Stary Mwaba was born in Chingola (Zambia) in 1976 and raised in the Copperbelt Province within a rich traditional background and intellectually stimulated environment surrounded by traditional craftsman and performers. He decided to move to Northern Province where he fostered his love to the arts, but also became a peer councillor for family life education. Starting in 1985, he attended a two-year apprentice programme under Lutanda Mwaba and built on his self-taught skills through various programmes of the Zambia National Visual Arts Council Academy. Currently living in Lusaka, an urban metropolitan area where different cultures and practices encounter each other, Mwaba states that the recent years living in the capital of Zambia have contributed significantly to his practice of arts.
In his paintings and installations, Stary deals with socio-political issues and develops individual narratives of history, real or imagined, of its visible and invisible traces and its effects on human beings.
Mwaba’s solo projects include the exhibitions “Crossing over Caribbean Contemporary Arts” in Port-of-Spain in 2005, “Freedom in Transition” at Lusaka National Museum in 2008 and “Solace of a Migrant” in Johannesburg in 2009 while he also jointly exhibited in New York, Ghana and Trinidad and Tobago. Stary was selected for a grant by the KfW Foundation to work and exhibit at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (Germany) for a period of 12 months from April 2014 to April 2015.