Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), moves across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—in order to inaugurate a new method for interpretation, an ante-formalism, which demonstrates black art’s recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity.
Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of October. Her articles appear in journals such as Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Film Quarterly, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, TDR: The Drama Review, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her art criticism has also been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Galleries, London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam.
Bradley's work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.She holds a PhD from Duke University, and was the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Bradley was also a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Aesthetic Theory, Art History, Black Critical Theory, Contemporary Art, Continental Philosophy, Critical theory, Film theory, Postcolonial Theory, Race and the Philosophy of Media.
