Anna Stielau

Anna Stielau studies contemporary art and visual culture in Southern Africa, with a focus on how artists use media technologies to build toward decolonized futures from the Global South. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in the journals Agenda, The Postcolonialist, and the Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change. Her dissertation and current book project, “Unsettling the Contemporary: Race, Redress and Revolutionary Times in South African Anticolonial Art,” investigates how post-apartheid artists appropriate technologies from clocks to archives to reclaim - and remake - time itself, with implications for studying both the legacies of colonialism and art's history more broadly. From 2020-22, she served as Assistant Editor of the journal Public Culture, and she is currently a 2022-23 Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice in NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab. A former arts journalist, Anna continues to write for a general readership in venues including Art Africa and South Africa's oldest art criticism site, Artthrob. She has twice been recognized for this work in South Africa’s National Arts Journalism Awards.