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.

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.

Danai Mupotsa is a Senior Lecturer in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a BA in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies (Luther College), a B. Soc. Sc. (Hons, First Class, UCT) in Gender and Transformation, an M. Soc. Sci in Gender Studies (UCT), and a PhD in African Literature and Cultural Studies (PhD). She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect and feminist pedagogies. Danai is a member of the editorial collective of Agenda Feminist Media, and recently co-edited the Agenda special issue “Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics” (2021) with Moshibudi Motimele. Danai has edited several other volumes, including 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. 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 is a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality.

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 Award - 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.

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.