Xabiso Vili is a poet and cultural worker whose practice builds bridges between memory, myth, and emerging futures. A World Poetry Slam Champion, Mandela Washington Fellow, and Mail & Guardian Top 200 Young South African, his work sits at the intersection of storytelling, technology, and collective healing.

Rooted in African oral traditions and contemporary digital tools, Vili creates immersive works that invite audiences to encounter heritage as something lived rather than archived. Through augmented and virtual reality, live performance, and installation, he transforms poetry into spatial, embodied experiences that operate across civic, cultural, and institutional spaces. His work asks how ancestral knowledge can guide the present, and how imagination can function as cultural infrastructure.

His acclaimed projects include Re/Member Your Descendants, an international AR poetry exhibition exploring ancestral memory in public and digital space; Guardians of Leeds, an interactive mural trail tracing the relationship between cities and the people who shape them; and Black Boi Meets Boogeyman, a VR collaboration with The Brother Moves On that reimagines masculinity through vulnerability and care. His multimedia installation Kwasukasukela - In the Beginning blends poetry, AI, animation, and projection mapping to retell African creation stories, touring internationally before being re-adapted for the Wits Anglo American Dome.

Beyond individual artworks, Vili builds platforms where creativity, diplomacy, and community meet. As the founder of Siziintsomi Creations, he develops immersive storytelling projects for cultural institutions and international contexts, positioning poetry as a tool for reflection, dialogue, and exchange.

For Vili, pushing culture forward means honouring where we come from while inventing new containers for how stories travel. His work insists that poetry is not only something we hear or read, but something we inhabit together.