Rizvana Bradley
Assistant Professor of Film & Media, Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art
On Leave 2023-2024
Specialty areas
Aesthetic Theory, Art History, Black Critical Theory, Contemporary Art, Continental Philosophy, Critical theory, Film theory, Postcolonial Theory, Race and the Philosophy of Media.
Bio
Rizvana Bradley is Assistant 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. She is the 2023–24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.
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 has published articles in 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, 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 most recently, the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam.
Her 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 BA from Williams College and a PhD from Duke University, and was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Books
Select Publications
Book:
Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form. Inventions: Black Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics. Stanford University Press, 2023.
Articles and Book Chapters:
(with Denise Ferreira da Silva) “Four Theses on Aesthetics,” e-flux, Issue #120, September 2021.
(All published work can be found here.)