Siona O'Connell

Siona O'Connell was born in Cape Town and completed her secondary schooling at Waterford Kamhlaba, United World College of Southern Africa, in Swaziland. She was educated at the University of Cape Town where she studied fine art, receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts (2006), Master of Arts in African Studies (2008) and Doctor of Philosophy in African Studies (2012). She was a Trilateral Reconnections Project Fellow at Brown University in the US and is a BIARI (Brown International Advanced Research Institutes) alumnus. She was, until November 2016, the Director of the Centre for Curating the Archive (CCA) at UCT and was one of the few black women in South Africa to head a research unit. Since December 2016, O’Connell has been based at UP Arts at the University of Pretoria (UP) as programme convener for museum and heritage studies. She is is a founding member of the Critical African Studies project at the university. Her duties include postgraduate supervision, lecturing, devising and overseeing the postgraduate programme. This programme, a first of its kind in South Africa, will foreground conservation and preservation of collections in tandem with critical thinking and interdisciplinary scholarship around themes that include history, the human, the urban, politics and culture.

She was the recipient of the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of the Humanities in Africana and Latin American Studies, Art and Art History and Film and Media Studies at Colgate University in the USA. She has published widely, curated numerous exhibitions, and directed and produced seven films that consider ways of life after racial oppression in South Africa. These include two on forced removals and restitution: An Impossible Return and Uitgesmyt, as well as a film on South Africa’s post-apartheid governing party, the African National Congress, titled Promises and Lies: Fault Lines of the ANC. Her latest film, In Gods Naam, considers the long reach of a colonial and slave history and confronts the schisms that remain unreconciled between the Nederduitse Gereformeerder Kerk (NGK) and The Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA).

Dr O’Connell co-edited Hanging on a Wire: Photographs by Sophia Klaase, which won the 2018 Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Award for Best Non-Fiction Edited Volume. She has published numerous papers on South African photography.

Her work pivots on ideas of place, belonging and freedom, with a specific focus on land restitution and restorative justice. Her research interests centre on ‘colouredness’, memory and trauma, and how to think about freedom after apartheid.