2025 Students

Lindelwa Mayibongwe Masilela is of Swati descent and grew up all over South Africa. She recently completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape in 2024. Lindelwa’s natural interest in history and anthropology led to her pursuit of a BA Honours degree in Curatorship at the University of Cape Town. Her passions lie in the complex and evolving relationship between anthropology and curatorial practices. Lindelwa plans to explore how anthropology provides curators with diverse methodological and theoretical frameworks to understand and interpret cultural histories and artefacts, while curators provide an inclusive space for anthropological knowledge to be engaged with and explored. From this interest, her Honours project will be centred around the inclusive and diverse relationship between visual anthropology and curatorial practices.

Matthew Michael is a non-binary artist and curator known for their interdisciplinary practice spanning assemblage sculpture, installation, curation, and drawing. Through these, they assemble items under borrowed aesthetics that provoke a celebration of domesticity while exploring the complexities of object relations in familiar contexts. A pivotal aspect of their practice involves aesthetic appropriation through deliberate but minimal transformations. These challenge prevailing aesthetic norms through recontextualization; new meanings emerge from relational dynamics. Their practice interrogates how aesthetic styles embody broader social values such as taste, trustworthiness, and lifestyle choices. At its core, their practice is an investigation into human relationships, questioning how the act of collecting, curating, and altering objects can offer new ways of thinking about memory and connection. This artistic practice strives to unsettle fixed ideas of value and meaning, encouraging a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of how we relate to the objects, the people, and the stories that define our lives.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Michael’s first solo exhibition, Arena, took place at the Association for Visual Arts in Cape Town, 2022, and their second solo presentation, 'The Head and the Heart in the Heat,' took place at Everard Read CIRCA Gallery, 2024. This exhibition was then published on the contemporary art blog titled Kuba Paris. They have participated in various group exhibitions, both locally and abroad, including '1 KASTEN' at Schoenwalder Project Space in Berlin, 2022, 'Full House' curated by Fede Arthouse and 'Under Projects' at Blank Projects in Cape Town, 2023, and 'Sublet' at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, 2023. They were also published in the Al-Tiba 9 ISSUE 17 Contemporary Art Magazine, 2024.

Julia Leisegang grew up in outer-west Durban and has always had a passion for the arts in performance, cultural, and fine art spaces. She moved to Cape Town in 2022 to study a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film and Media Production at UCT, with an additional focus on Art History, which she completed in 2024. Within her undergraduate film degree, she discovered a love for production design as a way of storytelling and visual representation. This ultimately led her to pursue her Honours in Curatorial Studies to advance her skills within alternative forms of storytelling, be it within fine art, museology, or film. Her current curatorial interests lie primarily in craft and fibre arts as a tool for patriarchal disruption due to its ability to create feminine connection, community, and opportunities for information sharing.

Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, Aqeelah received her BA in Psychology and Philosophy from UNISA, graduating cum laude. She is completing her Honours in Curatorship at UCT in 2025 while being a recipient of the MacIver Scholarship. Her main aims in the field of curating include making knowledge and education accessible to all—especially within a museum space—and bridging the gap between accessibility, opportunity, and pursuit. Her research interests include Art History, Anthropology, and Sociology. She has a diverse work background, ranging from academic writing to retail, childcare to fundraising, and everything in between. She also has a diverse academic background, with university modules including Physics and Biology, Ancient Cultures, and Anatomy, to name a few. She hopes to bring her diverse life experience and knowledge to help gain and provide insight into collecting, preserving, and interpreting information within the museum scope.

Mmadika Mphuthi is a media practitioner and sociologist working with media research, cultural analysis and writing, and African art and music production underlined with intersectional politics of analysis. Her first experiences in public media production and content writing were developed while contributing to SAX Appeal UCT and working at South African Fashion Week, where she contributed towards the behind-the-scenes video-journalism of the event. She would take an interest in film production and sociocultural research at the University of Cape Town where she majored in Film & Television, and Sociology for her undergraduate degree. During her tertiary years, she would observe the power of historical media as core to the fabric of social consciousness, and engage in research concerned with the sociopolitical dynamics of race, class, and gender representation in both historical and contemporary African media. She would also explore personal internet edutainment creation that would continue as one of her personal internet television research projects. As a prospective public education and African media archivist, she looks to pursue cultural research that works to improve the visibility and engagement of edutainment within the African public entertainment landscape while studying the constructions of media and music production from northern South Africa with an intersectional approach.

Lieza Campbell was born and raised in Cape Town. She completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Cape Town in 2024, majoring in Archaeology and Spanish. Throughout her undergraduate degree, she found herself gravitating towards subjects that dealt with history and heritage, which led to her deciding to pursue an Honours degree in Curatorship. Her interests are photography, specifically dark room photography and capturing the feeling of impermanence and expressions of liminality in visual art.

Roxanne Rose Modricky is a writer and theatre maker based in Cape Town. They graduated from City Varsity in 2018 with an undergraduate degree in Theatre Making and Performance. Having been an active participant and collaborator in the Cape Town theatre landscape since then, they have stage-managed, assistant-produced, and performed in many theatre pieces. Most recently, and most notably, they have been taking part in the Kgokelo Playwriting Network and Database as part of their incubation programmes since 2024. Roxanne is currently pursuing their Honours in Curatorship at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where they are exploring the intersection of personal narratives and the dialogue that can be crafted through curatorial intervention. 

Sange (b. 2003, eHewu) is a performance artist, visual historian, and latent curator based in Cape Town. He graduated with a BA degree (cum laude) and a BA Honours (cum laude) in Art History and Visual Culture from Rhodes University, South Africa. His honours research in Art History and Visual Culture explored the concept of the Black Deathscape and perpetual mourning by examining the history of massacres and colonial wars in Grahamstown (formerly Makhanda), particularly the Battle of Grahamstown, as events that constitute a Black deathscape. In connection with this concept, he studied the performance practice of visual artist Buhlebezwe Siwani, focusing on how she addresses violent colonial histories, African spirituality, and issues of mourning. Sange’s work is multidisciplinary, encompassing performance art, photography, video, installation, curating, and writing. He curates informal and intimate pop-up events of live art, public performative interventions, and experimental art with his friend and multidisciplinary artist Ezona Njokweni. Their curatorial practice as a collective focuses on space-making beyond the white cube, curating their first exhibitions, Siphethe Iinyembezi Ezeminyaka (2023) and Imvuselelo:Kwantlandlolo (2024). As an art writer, Sange's first paper will be published with ASAI under the emerging arts writers' development programme. His current focus this year for the curatorial fellowship at the Centre for Curating the Archive at UCT is on curating vernacular photography and performance art with sensibilities in Black Queer Township life. 

Born in the North West province, Mihlali Mabo is a poet and writer with a journalistic background. She completed her Bachelor of Arts at Rhodes University, majoring in Journalism and Media Studies and Art History. She has a vested interest in accessibility within the contentious space of the art world. She seeks to explore this by creating opportunities in the physical and material spaces, virtual and cyber spaces. Her scholarly interests deal with the archive and decoloniality politics therein. Specifically, mirroring the precolonial art practices evident in rock paintings with contemporary abstract figuration in Black art as a means to recodify language that was obscured by colonial intervention in written languages and texts. She is interested in intersecting the different academic fields of archaeology, fine art and journalism in her curatorial pursuits.

Selihamashango Kutame is a Bachelor of Architectural Studies (UCT) graduate and artist who has just started their Honours in Curatorship at the Centre for Curating the Archive (CCA). They have experience in styling and set design and are currently volunteering for the event Death of Glitter as part of the stage build and fabrication team. Born in Venda, they spent their early childhood in Johannesburg and Pretoria before moving permanently to Polokwane. Having moved from a small town to a big city and growing up primarily on the internet, their work is concerned with the liminal space and hybrid identity found within the African postcolonial context. Their work currently uses ornament, sculpture, analysis of architecture, and a collection of worn-out, low-resolution images from the internet to explore this fragmented postcolonial identity.