Michaelis Professor Berni Searle wins Mbokodo South African Women in the Arts Award 2015

Professor Berni Searle wins Mbokodo South African Women in the Arts Award 2015. She won in the category of Visual Arts (Sculpture, Painting and Video). This category celebrates artists who venture into new frontiers in their work and demonstrate deep imagination and originality. It values artists who explore new methods, subject matter and skills in their work.

Berni Searle was born in Cape Town in 1964 where she now lives and works teaching at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. She works with photography, video, and film to produce lens-based installations that stage narratives connected to history, memory, and place. Often politically and socially engaged, her work also draws on the universal emotions associated with vulnerability, loss and beauty.

In 2003 she received the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award, with a resulting solo exhibition, Float, which toured nationally. In 2004 Searle was short-listed for the international Artes Mundi award and was a Rockefeller Bellagio Creative Arts fellow in 2014. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in South Africa and internationally.