UJ’s Zamansele Nsele to explore future art collaborations at Getty International Program

Date: Feb 6, 2019 | Faculties, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, News

​Ms Zamansele Nsele, an Art lecturer within the Faculty or Arts, Design and Architecture (FADA) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), is set to jet off to New York after she was selected to participate at the prestigious CAA-Getty International programme.

The College Arts Association (CAA) Getty International Program, generously supported by the Getty Foundation, provides funding to between fifteen and twenty art historians, museum curators, and artists who teach art history to attend CAA’s Annual Conferences. The goal of the project is to increase international participation in CAA, to diversify the association’s membership, and to foster collaborations between North American art historians, artists, and curators and their international colleagues.

Nsele says, “I am proud to say I am a first- generation [Post-Apartheid] university graduate. This is an important step because there have been virtually no art books single authored by black female art historians in South Africa.”

Nsele has recently submitted her doctoral thesis in Art History & Visual Culture and is currently working on her first monograph. Her Ph.D. thesis is on Post-Apartheid Nostalgia and the Future of the Black Visual Archive.

“I am planning to fill this gap as I believe it is important for students to be exposed to black women who are producers of knowledge in my field,” added Nsele.

Nsele’s research interests include contemporary African art, Black Feminism, Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism and Blackface Minstrelsy in South African Visual Culture.

She concluded saying: “In my writing, I strive to connect art practice to current national questions. For instance, my latest article is on landscape art and the land question,” said Nsele.

In 2018, Zamansele Nsele was included in the Mail & Guardian’s list of Top 200 Young South Africans. She also presented her Ph.D. research at Vanderbilt University and Rutgers University in the USA, the University of East Anglia in the UK, the University of Ghana in Accra, Rhodes University and at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.