2026 Students

Otashia Reddy grew up on the outskirts of Cape Town. Through the influence of their mother, they developed an obsessive interest in all facets of history. Their time spent visiting local museums and art galleries instilled within them a passion for history and the way fragments of information are weaved into narrative.

They completed their BA in Fine Art at UCT Michaelis school of Fine Art in 2025. Their artistic practice is grounded in their interest in sustainability and the Anthropocene. By the end of 2025 their work had become primarily concerned with reuse and reformulating the ways in which we currently conceptualize waste/ excess/ by-product. To this end, they experimented with exhausted photochemistry in order to investigate the potential uses of the material beyond its initial purpose.

They are interested in curatorial practice that is both accessible as well as accommodating to people from different backgrounds, levels of education, languages and physical ability. This perspective is in response to what they perceive to be a practice of exclusion or inaccessibility within both the museum and gallery space. They collect rocks in order to remember, and their cat means more to them than life.

Sinovuyo Patiwe hails from the windy city of Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha) in the Eastern Cape and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Stellenbosch with Visual Studies as a major. Sino’s interest in visual culture led her to the Michaelis School of Fine Art where she is currently a curatorial fellow pursuing a BA Hons in Curatorship degree.

Her research interests lie in the politics of display and the ways in which exhibition-making mediates the relationships between objects, institutions and the audience. Working through feminist and decolonial frameworks, her thinking is particularly informed by feminist new materialism, an approach to attending to the agency of objects, bodies, and environment.  Through this lens, she is interested in how curatorial practice can challenge inherited modes of representation, foreground marginalised narratives and critically engage with the colonial legacies that are embedded within museum and gallery spaces.

Mars Hesseling was born and raised in Cape Town. They completed a BA in Fine Art at UCT in 2025, specialising in photography.

Through their undergraduate degree they became fascinated with continuous curation as a praxis that informs the art-making process and delved into ideas of layering and obscuring images to form relationships between different subject matters. They focused largely on themes of dissonance, queerness and constructions of the body. 

This year, through their Honours degree in Curatorship they plan to investigate these themes further, delving into the shifting dynamics between public and private. They are particularly interested in the role of the voyeur in how meaning is made and the politics of body shame. Broadly their curatorial focus is how narratives are constructed and packaged for the consumption of the public.

Ashlea Unthank raised in Mitchell’s Plain, Cape Town, has always had a passion for heritage and culture. Her ambition has always driven her to achieve her goals, from volunteering at the Iziko Slave Lodge and National Art Gallery since high school, to becoming the first in her family to graduate from university and continuing to postgraduate studies. She graduated from Stellenbosch University with a degree in BA Humanities with a focus in History and Ancient Cultures. 

Even as a young girl, history and storytelling has played a vital role in her life, beginning her lifelong dream of becoming a Historian and later, her love for curating spaces that tells a meaningful story, a dream that was realized when she began volunteering at the museums and fell in love with the craft. Her love for storytelling led her to pursue her Honours in Curatorship. Her current interest is focused on cultural heritage and identity, particularly coloured identity, paying tribute to her own cultural heritage and that of her family and community. She hopes to encourage young people in her community to complete their studies, by being an inspiration and teaching them to understand their own heritage.

Asante Cele is a South African of IsiZulu descent. She grew up in the Outer West of Durban and moved to Cape Town for her studies at the University of Cape Town. She recently completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and History. She is a creative individual with a passion for visual arts, particularly in photography. She is currently a postgraduate student in Curatorship at Michaelis.

Her interest in this degree is to be a positive and inspiring presence in gathering, organising, and accurately presenting people’s artworks in a fair manner. She loves to focus on uplifting narratives that showcase diverse perspectives creating a welcoming, inclusive atmosphere. 

Asante’s interest is to deal with a complex issue that lies at the intersection of ethics, public access, education, and cultural responsibilities. Her research focuses on dealing with troubling collections like colonial artworks produced within the framework of imperial and colonial systems. She wants to explore issues related to their preservation, ethical display and the complexities involved in decontextualising these works. These works often reflect the power structures, ideologies, and cultural attitudes of their time. Thus, highlighting historical asymmetries and ongoing debates about repatriation and cultural restitution.

Keziah Celestial Deneker grew up in Cape Town and since childhood has had an interest in Ancient History and Archaeology. This lifelong passion led her to pursue her studies in the ancients. She spent her undergraduate year at Stellenbosch University studying a plethora of ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Kush, Greece and Rome.

In December 2025, she graduated Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Art in the Humanities with a primary focus in Archaeology and Ancient Studies, and an additional focus in Visual Studies and Philosophy.  Recently, she received a certificate and prize for being one of the best students in Ancient Studies in 2025.

She is interested in how archaeological pedagogies manifest and are represented in exhibition spaces, and this led her to pursuing her Honours in Curatorship at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2026. Her Honours research project intends to unpack the curatorial practises that influence archaeological pedagogies which prioritise the research and exhibition of ancient elite artefacts. Her research project intends to grant visibility to underrepresented civilian populations and histories and use their ‘visually unremarkable’ artefacts and material culture to publicise the creative innovations made by civilians in response to ancient hegemonic traditions and cultural ideals.

Jordan Jones grew up in the northern suburbs of Cape Town and has always been surrounded by the art world, which cultivated an early interest in creative and cultural spaces. As his knowledge of art and its broader social contexts developed, he became increasingly interested in the field of Curatorship and the role it plays in shaping how art is experienced and understood.

He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Cape Town in 2025, majoring in Art History and Discourse and Industrial Sociology. These fields have allowed him to explore the relationship between culture, labour, and social structures, which continue to inform his research interests.

As of 2026 he is completing his Honours in Curatorship, where his work focuses on the intersections of sound, space, and exhibition-making. His current research explores techno music and vinyl records as cultural and spatial tools, examining how sound can reorganise space, foster collective experience, and create alternative ways of encountering art within both gallery and social environments.

Rachel Gray is a South African curator and illustrator.  She completed her undergraduate degree in Visual Communication at Red and Yellow, majoring in Design and Illustration. She focused on storytelling and image-making rooted in South African contexts. She is currently completing an Honours degree in Curatorship at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT, where she is interested in bringing grassroots stories into public view through thoughtful and creative forms of exhibition-making.

Her curatorial interests center on South African archives and the creative exhibition of stories that allow audiences to encounter the past in felt and meaningful ways. Her work is particularly concerned with the postcolonial context of South Africa and with the ghost of apartheid that continues to haunt Cape Town in the present. She explores this ghost through questions of identity, community, and memory, asking whether it appears as a trace of violence, a persistent absence, a shared inheritance, or a force that continues to shape how people imagine themselves and others. She is interested in how such histories take material and emotional form within spaces, objects, and lived experience.

Her current work investigates archives, books, and artists in order to connect histories of the past to the realities of the present. She is particularly interested in how environments shape communities in Cape Town, and in the behavioural and psychological dimensions of that shaping. Influenced by people, by their ways of moving through the world, and by the truths, contradictions, and deceptions they carry, Rachel’s practice seeks to ask difficult questions and to challenge familiar ways of seeing, remembering, and understanding.

Thabiso Mhlambiso is a heritage practitioner and emerging museum researcher from Vredenburg in the Western Cape, South Africa. He studied Social Sciences at the University of Pretoria and is currently pursuing postgraduate studies at the University of Cape Town with a focus on archaeology, anthropology, and critical museum practice.

He has worked within the Archaeology Unit at the Iziko South African Museum, where he contributed to major exhibitions such as “Humanity” and the ISAM 200 exhibition. These projects engage critically with human origins, the museum’s colonial legacy, and the ongoing transformation of museum narratives. Thabiso has also been a presenter at the Iziko 6th Annual International Museums Day Symposium.

His research focuses particularly on the Khoi and San diorama and the colonial history of body casting in South African museums, examining the ethical, historical, and cultural implications of these practices. He has been involved in ongoing community engagement work in the Northern Cape concerning the repatriation of body casts and the reburial of human remains currently held in museum collections. This work forms part of broader efforts to address historical injustices and to rehumanise individuals who were objectified through colonial scientific practices. Through his research and museum work, he aims to contribute to ethical curatorial practice, community-led heritage processes, and the transformation of museums in South Africa.