Antonio Sarmento Manuel

Mozambique

Born in Beira, Mozambique in 1982, Antonio Sarmento Manuel is a Drama For Life Honours Graduate. He will graduate this year with a BA Honours degree in English language teaching. He first got involved in theatre at secondary school and through his church and has taken courses in puppet theatre, story development and video production.

He is also a competitive chess player and has worked as a translator between Portuguese and English. While studying at Pedagogical University, Sarmento participated in four theatre competitions, as an actor and theatre director. In 2004, he won a competition for his piece on gender equality.

Sarmento has been involved in many associations dealing with HIV and AIDS, human rights, helping the disabled and other issues. He has been working as a volunteer at the National AIDS Council- Sofala Province in the Communication department. Sarmento has also been working for GTZ conducting workshops on HIV and AIDS education for GTZ workers and other issues related to communication.

In 2009, Sarmento taught and directed a theatre group in secondary school, teaching English to children and opened an English Language Laboratory together with Centro Cultural Padre Cirilo with the aim of bringing language to people that could not afford to pay for English courses at private schools. He has also finished the translation of the piece The truth about you by Grace Meadows.

Sarmento is also working on a personal project for the development of a theatre intervention program for disabled people.

He is a writer and storyteller and as a Drama For Life Scholar, he has performed in a piece entitled Speak truth to power, directed by Ndiyapo Machacha and researched on the effectiveness of puppetry in HIV and AIDS intervention.

He is currently working as a teacher in a recently opened University called Instituto Superior de Artes e Cultura in Maputo and preparing his paper on a funeral as a therapeutic performance.