Reggie Teys

BIO

Reggie Teys is a South African interdisciplinary artist, cellist, and creative provocateur whose work spans sound, visual art, installation, and performance. Rooted in classical training and township soul, their practice challenges conventions and occupies the bold space between high art and subversive street culture. With a distinctive artistic voice shaped by lived experience, political nuance, and poetic rebellion, Reggie Teys is forging a singular path that defies categorisation.

As a composer-performer, Reggie’s sonic language blends cello improvisation with jazz, hip-hop, indigenous rhythm, and digital manipulation—transforming the concert stage into a ritual of introspection and protest. Their visual and installation work—often laced with optical illusions, moiré patterns, and coded satire—taps into themes of duality, freedom, identity, and ritual. Through their visual arts series, including The Art of Being and The Grootman Series, they articulate the often-unspoken complexities of masculinity, mental health, and postcolonial identity.

Their contribution to the South African cultural landscape is significant: as a touring musician with national philharmonics and chamber groups, a featured artist on the Beyond Music Vol. 4 global album, and an exhibiting visual artist in prominent independent spaces. Reggie has also collaborated with institutions such as the Centre for the less good idea and has been mentored by figures like composer Neo Muyanga.

In 2025, he is set to launch Roll'ihlahla, a cult brand and touring experience merging music, satire, and cannabis culture into immersive performance rituals. Inspired by the spirit of resistance and the simplicity of ancient herbs, Roll'ihlahla becomes a symbol of generational consciousness and connection.

Reggie Teys stands at the intersection of sound and silence, shadow and light, tradition and rebellion—an artist whose work doesn’t just speak, but listens, disrupts, and heals.