Danielle Bowler is a writer, editor and musician based in Johannesburg. With bylines in multiple publications including Dazed, Wanted Magazine, Imbiza Journal of African Writing, New Frame, Africa is a Country, and Moya, her work focuses on reading, understanding and theorising art and culture through a Black feminist lens. Danielle is a PhD fellow and researcher at The Centre for Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg and an associate of the SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imagination.

Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Art and Archeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and the founding convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. Her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe and southern Africa, and the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt has published five books including: A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021); Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017); Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); and Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis Steidl, 2020), received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation.

Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi is Associate Professor in English at the University of Johannesburg and Director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class. She is a research associate of the Institute of Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University (New York) and a senior research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study (JIAS) at the University of Johannesburg. Prof Collis-Buthelezi has held posts in English at the University of Cape Town and as a Senior Researcher at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests include Black intellectual history as well as Caribbean, African, and African American literatures. She has published in Small Axe, Callaloo, and The Black Scholar, in which she co-edited a special issue on “Black Studies in South Africa”.  She is a member of the Other Universals Collective, which explores intellectual histories of exchange across Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Her current book project, Ends of Empire, Black Liberation, excavates the print cultures of Black migrants to Cape Town from the Caribbean, the US, West Africa and other parts of South Africa before the rise of anti-colonial nationalism.

Thulile Gamedze is a Johannesburg-based cultural worker—producing writing, curricular, drawing, conversation and clothes—interested in the dialogic possibilities that emerge through the collapse of disciplinary structures. She has an M.Phil in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town and has written extensively for art publications, including the catalogues for Documenta 14 and iterations of Recontres’ de Bamako, as well as for academic journals, including South Atlantic Quarterly and Radical Philosophy. She teaches irregularly at the University of the Witwatersrand in art history, is a member of Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), and likes to play with creative interventions layering text with textile, social life, and pictures.

Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Barnard Digital Humanities Center. Her teaching and research interests include francophone literature, particularly that of Haiti and the French Antilles; colonialism and postcolonialism; and sub-Saharan francophone African cinema. She advises students in French, Africana Studies, Comparative Literature, and Human Rights. Her first book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP), addresses the general issue of canon formation in the francophone Caribbean and the particular fate of the Haitian Spiralist authors vis-à-vis this canon. Her most recent monograph, "A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being," was published with Duke University Press in 2020. She has co-edited several works, including New Narratives of Haiti for Transition magazine (2013), Translating the Caribbean for Small Axe (2015), Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine for Yale French Studies (2016); The Haiti Exception (2016), and The Haiti Reader (2020). She is the founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis, the founding co-organizer of "The Caribbean Digital," and the founding co-director of the digital humanities project In the Same Boats: Toward an Afro-Atlantic Intellectual Cartography.

Gabrielle Goliath situates her practice within the histories, life worlds and present-day conditions of black, brown, femme and queer life, refusing its terminal demarcation within a paradigm of racial-sexual violence. The conditions of hope that underscore the social encounters of her work ask for what she terms a life-work of mourning – “for to imagine and seek to realise the world otherwise is to bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to and must transform”.

Goliath’s immersive installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize/Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. www.gabriellegoliath.com

Khwezi Gule is a curator and writer based in Johannesburg. He was Chief Curator at the Soweto Museums which includes, the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum and the Kliptown Open Air Museum. Prior to that Gule held the position of curator: contemporary collections at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. He is the current Chief Curator of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California. Professor Jackson is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World: winner of the Harry Levin First Book Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, the Lambda Literary Book Award for LGBTQ Studies and is featured in Artforum magazine’s “Best of 2021” issue. Her research explores the literary and aesthetic aspects of Western philosophical and scientific discourse and investigates the engagement of African diasporic literature, film, and visual art with the historical concerns, knowledge claims, and rhetoric of Western science and philosophy. Professor Jackson is at work on a second book, tentatively titled “Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex/Gender.” www.zakiyyahimanjackson.com

Zara Julius is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also the founder of Pan-African creative research and cultural storytelling agency, KONJO. Her work is concerned with the relationship between performativity, frequency, concealment and fugitivity in the settler (post) colony, with a special focus on what we call the ‘Global South’. Working with sound, video, performance and objects, Zara Julius’ practice involves the collection, selection, collage and creation of archives (real, imagined and embodied) through extensive research projects. She is especially engaged in thinking through the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they might help us imagine new futures, and experience different present(s). She holds a BAHons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town and a MAFA in Fine Art by Research and Practice from the University of the Witwatersrand. Zara has exhibited and presented her work across South Africa and internationally. www.zarajulius.com

Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, and critic. Her books include Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, and Code Noir. Lubrin is the recipient of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Windham Campbell Prize, and other honors. Lubrin is an assistant professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada, where she completed her MFA in Creative Writing.

K'eguro Macharia is an independent scholar from Nairobi, who lingers at the seam of Africa and the Black Diaspora. Author of Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora, K'eguro is currently thinking toward suture, a meditation on Black women's aesthetic practices of invention and repair.

Sinethemba Makanya is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg. She also serves as an academic coordinator at the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Care at the University of Witwatersrand. Makanya recently completed her PhD in Medical Humanities and Psychology at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), University of Witwatersrand. Her thesis, Ukugula Kwabantu: The constructions of mental health by traditional healers in a peri-urban context, allowed her to draw upon her concurrent roles as a scholar and traditional healer, focussing on constructions of reality, knowledge, the human and health, whilst centring an African paradigmatic worldview understood through her initiation into traditional healing. Her research interests centre around Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the application of their philosophies by practitioners (such as izinyanga and izangoma) in ways that strengthen theory from (and of) the Global South. She is also interested in how Indigenous Knowledge Systems and their practitioners can become active players in the transformation of curricula.

Nomusa Makhubu is an Associate Professor of art history at the Universityv of Cape Town and an artist. She received the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award (2006) and the Prix du Studio National des Arts Contemporain, Le Fresnoy (2014). She was the 1st Runner-Up in the DST Women in Science Awards, 2017. Makhubu was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and was an African Studies Association (ASA) Presidential Fellow in 2016. In 2017, Makhubu she received a Mandela-Mellon fellowship at Harvard University. She co-edited a Third Text Special Issue: ‘The Art of Change’ (2013) and later co-curated with Nkule Mabaso the international exhibition, Fantastic, in 2015.  Makhubu is a member of the South African Young Academy of Science (SAYAS) and was the chairperson of Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), 2016-18. Her current research focuses on African popular culture, photography, interventionism, live art and socially-engaged art. 

Moshibudi Motimele  is a theorist, researcher, teacher, and writer currently completing a doctoral degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her work centers on questions of black intellectual histories, critical pedagogies, and emancipatory epistemologies. She is co-editor of this Agenda special issue on The Intimacies of Pandemics. Her forthcoming co-edited book is titled Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities. She currently works as a lecturer in the Department of Political Studies and Governance at the University of the Free State.

Danai S. Mupotsa teaches in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand. She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect and feminist pedagogies. Danai has edited several volumes, most recently “Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics” (Agenda, 2021) with Moshibudi Motimele; a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled “Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa” with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck, and “Black Transnational Feminisms and the Question of Structure”, (forthcoming) co-edited with Lyn Ossome and Athi Nkopo. Danai was part of the research team working in collaboration with Urgent Action Fund - Africa that recently published IDS Working Paper 576 (2022), Contextualising Healing Justice as a Feminist Organising Framework in Africa. In 2018, she published her first collection of poetry entitled feeling and ugly. The Portuguese translation, feio e ugly was published in 2020 by Editora Trinta Zero (Maputo). Danai has performed on several poetry stages, including the Poeta’s D’Alma Festival Internacional de Poesia e Artes Performativas in Maputo in 2018, and the Poetry Africa Festival in 2021.

Darieck Scott is the author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010), which examines representations and theorizations of the relation between blackness, abjection, and queer masculinity. Scott is also the author of the novels Hex (2007) and Traitor to the Race (1995), and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica (2004). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Freedom in This Village (2005), Black Like Us (2002), Giant Steps (2000), Shade (1996) and Ancestral House (1995), as well as in the erotica collections Flesh and the Word 4 (1997) and Inside Him(2006). He has published essays in Callaloo, GLQ, The Americas Review, and the collection Gay Travels. Scott is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California of Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and an M.A. in African American Studies and a J.D. from Yale. 

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at the Arizona State University. She is the author of: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016) - named by the Guardian and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy A - and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010).Her third book Ordinary Notes, will be published in 2022 (Knopf/FSG/Daunt). She is also working on a monograph called Black. Still. Life.

Thuthuka Sibisi’s musical education began at the world-renowned Drakensberg Boy’s Choir School. He subsequently went on to graduate with a Bachelor of Music at Stellenbosch University in 2011. Alongside his music studies he completed studies in Physical Theatre and Movement with Sam Prigge and Estelle Olivier (Stellenbosch). He is a graduate of the MA (Performance Making) program at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. and is currently a Phd Fellow with Race:Gender:Class at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). Thuthuka has toured extensively, performing throughout South Africa as well as Asia, Europe and the Americas. In 2016 he made his Italian debut as Music Director and composer (alongside Philip Miller) for William Kentridge’s Triumphs and Laments (Rome, Italy). Further projects include a commission by Cape Town Opera for Musiquées Sacrée d’Afrique et d’Europe, in residence at Festival International d’Aix-en-Provence (France). Thuthuka is currently co-creating Broken Chord alongside choreographer and dancer, Gregory Maqoma. He is a recipient of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans (2017, RSA), Ampersand Foundation Fellow (2018, NYC), American Academy in Berlin resident (2019, Germany), Bushwick Center resident (2019, NYC) Goethe Institut resident fellow (2019, Germany) and Performa Curatorial Fellow (2019, NYC).

Tuliza Sindi is an architecture educator, researcher, and practitioner, and Unit 19 founder and leader at the University of Johannesburg's Graduate School of Architecture (GSA). She approaches the ground as a calendar and architecture as its metronome. Through archaeological and cartographic frameworks, and at scales that range from the ideological to the intimate, her works speculate about liberating grounds from their chronopolitical captivity toward proposing new ground philosophies and their corresponding futures. In 2022, she co-founded cross-disciplinary architecture collective room19isaFactory. with Unit 19 graduates. Through what they call the practice of ‘Quiet Architecture’, they work to bridge the ever-growing gap between emerging academic spatial research, thought, and practice, and the conservative and gate-keeping architecture profession on the African continent.

Tendayi Sithole is Professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation, University of Johannesburg. Sithole is the author of Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology in Azania (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2022), The Black Register (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), and Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). His two books: The Letter in Black Radical Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books) and Refiguring in Black (Cambridge: Polity Press) are forthcoming in May and June 2023, respectively. Currently, Sithole is writing a biography provisionally titled “Vinny Da Vinci:  A Portrait.

Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor at the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies, she has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France and was most recently the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta. She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021) and prefaced by Saidiya Hartman. This book was distinguished by the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020. In 2022-2023, Maboula Soumahoro is International Visiting Professor at the African-American and Africana Studies Department of Columbia University as well as Visiting Faculty at Bennington College.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is  Malcom S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media. He teaches and researches in the areas of critical theory, Black literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (forthcoming). Currently, he is working on Black Life/SchwarzSein, which situates Blackness as an ungendered ontology of unbelonging. A selection of his writings can be found here: http://bit.ly/13uHdOa

Nelisiwe Xaba received a scholarship to study at the Johannesburg Dance Foundation, as well as the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London. Returning to South Africa in 1997, she joined Pact Dance Company and later launched her solo career, and began working with a variety of esteemed choreographers, including Robyn Orlin. Her work is informed largely by her feminist and racial politics which challenge stereotypes of the black female body and mainstream notions of gender. She has been involved in various multimedia projects, collaborating with visual artists, fashion designers, theatre and television directors and poets and musicians. Her seminal works such as “Plasticization” and “They Look At Me & That’s All They Think” have toured internationally over the last few years. In 2013, Neli performed “The Venus” in Venice as part of Imaginary Fact – Contemporary South African Art and the Archive at the South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the same year, the film version of her acclaimed performance piece “Uncles & Angels”, a collaboration with Mocke J Van Veuren, was awarded the FNB Art Prize. In 2016 she created “Urban Mermaid” which was performed at the Goodman Gallery 50th Anniversary and at Berliner Festspiele. In 2017, she presented “Bang Bang Wo” at the Centre for the Less Good Idea, with funding from National Arts Council. The collaboration “Hominal/Xaba” with Marie-Caroline Hominal, a Swiss dancer and choreographer, premiered in 2019. Her latest piece is a sound installation “Nzinga” for the 2020 Virtual National Arts Festival.