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= Esteri Tebandeke = From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Esteri Tebandeke, (born 16 May 1984) is a Ugandan actress, dancer and visual artist. She is a graduate of the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art at Makerere University and a Ugandan visual artist with a bias towards fabric decoration. As an up and coming artist, she allows herself to be influenced by different aspects of the arts and life in general.

She has played roles in the films Sins of the Parents (2008), Master on Duty (2009) directed by Joseph "Zenken" Ssebaggala, Queen of Katwe (2016) and Her Broken Shadow (2016) which will be her first foray into the sci-fi genre.

Early life and education
Esteri was born in Kampala, Uganda and is of Teso descent on both sides of her family, and is the sixth of eight children and her family has been living in Uganda. Esteri attended St. Joseph's Girl's Secondary School in Uganda and acted in school plays and dance performances.

Dance
Esteri starting working as a contemporary dancer in 2008 and has performed with various dance and theatre companies in Uganda namely Keiga Dance Company, Stepping Stones dance company, Mutumizi dance Company and many others. She has previously performed at various arts platforms namely; Dance Week Uganda, Dance Transmissions Festival (both annual contemporary dance showcases), Bayimba International Festival of the Arts and Umoja International Festival– initially as a student and a teacher for 3 years– to mention a few. Her work is not restricted to Uganda and she has been involved in projects in Kenya, Rwanda, Madagascar, South Africa, Tanzania, the United States of America, and Ethiopia.

Acting
Esteri got her first acting role in a short film on one of the programs of the Maisha Film Lab program– a Uganda-based non-profit film training initiative founded by award winning director Mira Nair for emerging East African and South Asian filmmakers.

She has been an actress since 2008 performing in a variety of theatre and film productions in Uganda. Her latest film work was on the soon to be released Walt Disney Pictures production, Queen of Katwe, starring Academy Award winning actress Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo. Other theatre projects have included Maria Kizito– lead actress as a psychopathic nun– a play by Brown University professor, Erik Ehn about the trial of nuns who facilitated the massacre of Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide. She was the lead actress in Cooking Oil, a play by award winning playwright Deborah Asiimwe, which was performed in Uganda and the United States of America. Other theatre projects have included a mentally disturbed psychiatrist in the Ugandan production of The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War as well as a frustrated wife in The Marriage Chronicles.

In late 2015, Esther travelled to the Northern part of Uganda with a group of artists to collect stories and hopefully turn these into stage plays that will be presented to audiences around the world. The Story Circle project, which was headed by Jerry Stropnicky, a theatre practitioner in the USA gave her great insights into the use of story as a mechanism to help people cope with different aspects of life such as trauma.

She has also ventured into directing and worked on a theatre project, Spice from Afroman ensemble. The project premiered in Kampala in June 2015 and has since shown in Ivory Coast and is booked to show in Rwanda, Tunisia and Niger.

She has also been involved as a teacher in other arts projects and her desire to gain more life experience and share what she knows with others in a professional environment drives her to work with people from all walks of life. Her experience has also involved instruction of children in different schools around the city of Kampala.

Personal life
Esteri has been married since 2011 to Samuel Tebandeke, a screenwriter and arts manager. The live together in Uganda.