Thandiwe writes poems that you can dance to and she's been playfully using rhythm as a teaching tool for more than two decades. She is perhaps best known for recitations that reconnect words to their sonic roots and fully employ their capacity to awaken and inspire. Her performances have been presented in venues around the country and she frequently produces concerts with her husband and long-time collaborator, musician/composer Daniel Arite (in a duo known as The Arite Shiphrah Artist Team). They also co-produce community art projects and have released two poetry and music CDs, The Secret Marvelous Instead (2002) and Biting the Peony (2009).

Thandiwe’s visual art has been featured in national print publications and exhibited locally in solo and group exhibitions. Recent and notable shows include Perceptions of Reality (2024) and Here We Are Now (2023) at Middle Tennessee State University Todd Art Gallery; Art of Healing Exposition, sponsored by the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University and the World Health Organization (2021-2022) and the Nashville Visionaries Exhibition at Tennessee State University (2019). In 2020 her work was selected for the Metro Arts ARTWORKS Lending Library public art collection. The Uplift bus shelter mural, a collaboration by the Arite Shiphrah Artist Team, has been installed in the south Nashville neighborhood of Woodbine as part of the public art project Envision Nolensville Pike.

Thandiwe’s current projects are an extension of the work she's been doing for three decades: using the arts to inspire creativity, cross-cultural communication, and collective problem-solving. Through art making, teaching, exhibiting, and performing, she invites people to reflect, write, tap into their imagination and share their hopes, dreams, struggles, and triumphs. Her passionate explorations of the creative process contribute to our collective understanding of the ways in which art informs and enriches our personal and communal lives.