Born in 1982 in Mbabane, Swaziland, Mntambo lives in Johannesburg. She graduated with a Master’s in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2007.

Material Value, a solo exhibition of her work was shown at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (2017). Mntambo won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2011, for which she produced the national travelling exhibition Faena. She has had seven solo shows at Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg (2007-17) and two at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm (2013-15).

Mntambo featured in the inaugural exhibitions at the Norval Foundation, other notable group exhibitions include Matereality at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2020); Ngoma: Art and Cosmology at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2019); IncarNations: African Art as Philosophy at the BOZAR Centre for Arts, Brussels (2019); Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2019); Not A Single Story, the Nirox Winter Sculpture Fair in Johannesburg (2018); Regarding Africa: Contemporary Art and Afro-Futurism at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017);  Afrique Capitales across Paris and Lille (2017); Disguise: Masks and Global African Art at the Seattle Art Museum (2015) and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2016); What Remains is Tomorrow, the South African Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists at the MMK Frankfurt, SCAD Museum of Art and Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC (2014-15); My Joburg at La Maison Rouge, Paris, and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2013); 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2012); 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); 9^th and 12th Dakar Biennales (2010 and 2016); Les Rencontres de Bamako biennial of African photography (2009); and Apartheid: The South African Mirror, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2008). 

Mntambo was shortlisted for the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize in Canada in 2014 and was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow for 2013.

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