Kamogelo Walaza
Kamogelo Walaza is a multidisciplinary artist who obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Arts in the field of Applied Drama and Theatre Studies (with distinction) as well as a BA Honours in Drama Therapy from the University of the Witwatersrand. In addition, she attended the University of Johannesburg where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Corporate Communications, an Honours degree in Communication Studies as well as an Honours degree in Public Management and Governance. She is currently a Masters candidate in the field of Masters of Arts in Fine Arts( MAFA), where she conducts autoethnographic research. Her main pedagogies from this research are intersectionality, identity politics , Performance Art and memory. She was awarded the Marshall Kander Drama for Life award for outstanding research in HIV/AIDS education through Applied Drama and Theatre. She recently produced an autoethnographic research paper, which received a distinction, that launched an inquiry into the “memories in her blood”. In 2021, she was an Assistant Curator for three exhibitions at Oliewenhuis Art Museum from their permanent art collection. She also curated Arts Education workshops at Oliewenhuis Art Museum and was involved in further projects with ArtBank SA. She later joined Studio Nxumalo as an Assistant Curator and Projects Manager, where she assisted with curation at FNB Art Joburg, Turbine Art Fair and Aspire Art, to name a few. She is currently a recipient of the Young Curator incubator , mentored by Nomusa Makhubu which is in collaboration with the Goethe Institute. She won a residency with bag factory award for Young /unframed Curator 2023/2024. Her interests as a Curator is Social Practice and Process led Creative Practice and is currently practicing as an Independent Curator. Some of her most recent performance pieces were part of the OUSUN exhibition in collaboration with Wits School of the Arts as well as the Wits School of the Arts Art Matters: Inherited Histories and Politics of Mapping Postgraduate Student Conference. She is a skilled emerging curator, arts education facilitator, dedicated writer and ethnographer.
Voni Baloyi
Voni Baloyi was born in Krugersdorp, Johannesburg in 1999. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art History and Law from the University of Cape Town in 2020, and is currently studying towards her Masters in Art History. Her research deals with notions of pleasure and eroticism in imaginings of Black women, and how the law and specifically the constitution can be understood alongside pleasure as a mechanism for liberation. She is thus concerned with how the law infringes upon the right to dignity as inscribed in documents such as the Constitution of South Africa and how pleasure can be measured by the extent to which one has the full enjoyment of their human rights. Baloyi recently co-curated An Ode to the Wild Cliffs: Moments in Time (2023) with artist Jill Trappler and Siyabonana (2024) in collaboration with the Centre for Art Education at Zeitz MOCAA. She has written for multiple publications which include Artthrob, Mail & Guardian, and Daily Maverick. Baloyi’s current project entitled At Their Feet which will be realised under this fellowship is a critical examination of revolutionary mothering as a tool for political mobilisation and how collaborative care can be translated to reciprocity, responsiveness, and relativity between artists.
Sihle Motsa
Sihle Motsa is an Art Historian and Art practitioner who earned her Master’s in Art History at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has worked as a lecturer, researcher and writer, authoring texts for the Daily Maverick, Artthrob, Atlantica Contemporaries amongst others. She has curated exhibitions that speak to a myriad of themes including black material cultures, ecological vernaculars and black women’s artistic practices. She is currently pursuing a second Master’s degree with the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. She is the 2023 Marie-Solanges Apollon Scholarship holder and part of the DAAD MuseumsLab 2024 cohort. Her work seeks to co-construct a vernacular lexicon with the people of kwaZulu Natal as a means of reckoning with the province’s ongoing political and ecological turmoil. Her work figures black cultural, aesthetic, artistic and intellectual traditions as pertinent to the work of comprehending the entangled political and ecological realities. As such, it works through archival and historical sites and space of contemporary community organising to create narratives that are representative of life at the nexus of climate injustice and endemic violence.
Annchen Bronkowski
Annchen Bronkowski is an art and visual culture historian with a PhD in art historical studies from the University of Cape Town. She also holds a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from Stellenbosch University and an Honours degree in Curatorship from the University of Cape Town. Following her studies in South Africa, she completed a Master’s in Museum studies at the University College London and a Master’s in Art History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her doctoral research presents the first thorough history of the South African national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her research interests revolve around the issues of collective identities and the politics of their representation – the institutions of public art, the structures of their functions, thesocio-politics of their construction, and the dialogues about their meanings. Her expertise covers especially identity politics as they are complicated at large-scale national or international art and culture events. She has been awarded numerous grants and awards by institutions like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, and the Arts in Society Research Network.