Zamansele Nsele is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary African & African Diasporic Art. She is also below-the-line affiliated with the African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies department.
Nsele is currently finalizing her first monograph, provisionally titled “Post-apartheid Nostalgias: Archival Art and the Figuration of the Black Subject”. In this work, she interrogates how restorative nostalgias generate visual epistemologies that sanitize, disavow, and aestheticize oppressive racial histories—challenging the conventional view of nostalgia as merely an affirmation of Black social life. A central and consistent theme in her scholarship is an Afropessimist critique of image-based rituals of antiblack violence. Her broader research and teaching interests engage critical theories of Blackness in visual art, with a particular interest in African modernisms and the tradition of art movements in the African diaspora and Africa. The subject of her forthcoming second book project is the citationality and curatorial adaptation of the Black literary tradition into the visual art.
Zamansele is a co-editor and contributor to The Imagined New (or what happens when History is a Catastrophe?) Working through Alternative Archives (Iwalewahaus, 2023). Her recent contributions include writing for the 60th Venice Biennale catalogue, Foreigners Everywhere (2024), focusing on artists Ernest Mancoba, Irma Stern, and Edoardo Villa. She also provided biographical texts on South African artists Selby Mvusi, Gerard Sekoto, and Peter Clarke for the exhibition catalogue African Modernism in America 1947-1967 and analyzed Black Queer visibility in Zanele Muholi’s work for the groundbreaking publication Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography.
Beyond the academy, Nsele is a widely published critic, journalist, and cultural organizer. Her articles have appeared in MoMA’s Post: notes on art in a global context, the Journal of Asian and African Studies, and the Mail & Guardian, where she has conducted compelling interviews with figures such as Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga and scholar Frank B. Wilderson III. In 2018, she was named one of the Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans and was selected as one of the top 15 art historians in the Global South for the prestigious CAA-Getty program. Zamansele Nsele has chaired and presented in panels at the Arts Council of African Studies Association (ACASA) triennial. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she lectured at the University of Johannesburg and Rhodes University and served as co-convener of the Gerard Sekoto Winter/Summer School at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
