Staff Members

Dominic Thorburn                                                               ‌

BFA,MFA (Rhodes), Tamarind Professional Printer (New Mexico)

Professor(HOD)

email: d.thorburn@ru.ac.za

Dominic Thorburn is an artist printmaker who has exhibited locally and abroad and is broadly represented in museum, corporate, and private collections. As a past winner of the Absa Atelier he was granted a year’s residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship he studied at the renowned Tamarind Institute, University of New Mexico, USA. He has presented papers on diverse aspects of printmaking at numerous international conferences and is widely published on the subject. Thorburn was co-convenor of the 3^rd Impact International Printmaking Conference held in South Africa in 2003. Strong interests in collaborative printmaking motivated him to establish the Fine Line Press, a unique tertiary based printmaking press and research unit. Thorburn is active in arts administration and policy development, and is dedicated to community engagement and advocacy projects. Research interests include the visual narrative and oral history, large format combination printmaking, and alternative and accessible print mediums.

Ruth Simbao

BFA (Stellenbosch),MWS (ICS, Toronto), MPhil (ICS, Toronto), AM (Harvard), PhD (Harvard)

Associate Professor

email: r.simbao@ru.ac.za

Ruth Simbao focuses on art, culture and heritage in Africa and the African-Diaspora. Her PhD research on contemporary cultural ceremonies in Zambia considered the relationship between performance and the “promiscuity of tradition.” Her recent research interests include contemporary Zambian and South African art, issues of diaspora in relation to ‘place’, and theories of transnationalism and Afropolitanism. Having lived in Kenya, South Africa, Canada, the USA and Zambia, she is fascinated with the ways that globalisation and movement (migration, exile and diaspora) affect contemporary art in local contexts, particularly those still dealing with social injustices. Ruth Simbao has presented academic papers in South Africa, Canada, the USA, Australia and Jamaica and has published numerous articles in South African and international journals such Art South Africa, Third Text, African Arts, Parachute, Mix, Fuse, De Arte and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art.

Christine Dixie

BFA (Witwatersrand), MFA (Cape Town)
Senior Lecturer

email: c.dixie@ru.ac.za

Christine Dixie is an artist who extends the boundaries of print making as a medium by working in installation and by using a variety of matrix’s and materials. Thematically her works are focussed on ‘performances’ of gender as well as critical interrogations of a colonial landscape tradition. In particular she is concerned with representations of the Eastern Cape landscape and the liminal space between the interior and the exterior both physical and psychological. She has been the recipient of several fellowships and awards. Most recently she was awarded an Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. her works have been widely exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is currently on exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art on the exhibition Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa. Her work is included in many collections including the New York Public Library, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Isiko South African Museum and the Johannesburg Art Museum. 

Brent Meistre

BFA,MFA,PGDHE(Rhodes)
Senior Lecturer

email: b.meistre@ru.ac.za

Brent Meistre has been an ABSA Atelier Merit Award winner, a finalist in the Daimler Chrysler Award for Contemporary Photography and the 2006 winner of the first Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum’s Biennale award. Apart from his five one-person exhibitions and participation in numerous group exhibitions, he has also collaborated on projects with theoretical psychologists and interactive sound artists. He works across media including stop-frame animation, video, and sound design and manipulation. Throughout his different projects, he investigates the possibilities of single and multiple images as cinematic and thereby plays with the veiling of meanings and narratives. Focusing on exhibiting bodies of work that are gallery or installation based, much of his photographs deal with associations and mnemic layers that he believes are particularly evocative of facets of the South African psyche.

Maureen de Jager

BFA, MFA (Witwatersrand)
Senior Lecturer

email: m.dejager@ru.ac.za

Maureen de Jager has exhibited both locally and internationally. She has held four solo exhibitions at the National Festival of the Arts, including In Sepia (Main Festival Programme, 2008) and Maria’s Story (Main Festival Programme, 2012). In 2010 she was a finalist in the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum Biennial Exhibition and Award. She works across media, often utilising materials and/or found objects which have rich metaphorical associations in regards to her thematic interests in family history, trauma, memory and melancholic loss. These include steel and rust, which she uses to invoke the deterioration of memory over time. Her art-making is supplemented by an interest in art history and theory. She has authored a number of conference papers and journal articles.

Nomusa Makhubu

BFA,MA(Rhodes)
Mellon Lecturer

email: n.makhubu@ru.ac.za

Nomusa Makhubu is currently reading towards a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture. She has exhibited in South Africa, France, Germany, Swaziland and Reunion Island after receiving the ABSA Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award in 2006 as well as the Rhodes Amnesty International Woman of the Year Award (Art). She was nominated as the presenting artist for the Business Day: Business and Art South Africa (BASA) Awards in 2008. Makhubu became an Abe Bailey fellow in 2008 which involved a travel bursary to the United Kingdom and aims to effect co-operation and understanding among those with various language and cultural backgrounds. Funded by the Würth Scholarship, her M.A. research focussed on politics of identity and sexuality where she interrogated traditionalisms, culturalism and African-ness. She has presented research papers examining visual politics in contemporary South African art.

Rat Western

BFA,MFA (Wits)
Lecturer

email: n.western@ru.ac.za

Rat Western received a BAFA degree in painting and a MFA in Interactive Media from the University of the Witwatersrand. She has worked for several years in the advertising industry as a freelance web and print media specialist, and in addition has lectured at the Wits School of Art in Digital Arts. She is the International and News Editor for the online publication ArtThrob. Western’s artistic practice ranges from video, netart and digitally manipulated photography to live performance. Her conceptual focus is the art of storytelling – mythologising daily life and the alchemy of everyday objects. Western has received a number of awards for her artwork including The Martienssen Prize (2002), the HP Invision Digital Photographic Award (2003), and joint second place in the Sasol New Signatures Award (2006) for her video work Untitled: Night Watch. She has exhibited nationally in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban and internationally in Florence, Dublin and Rotterdam.

Moira Japp

Office Administrator
email: moira.japp@ru.ac.za

Jan Nell

BFA (Rhodes)

Principal Technical Officer
email: j.nell@ru.ac.za

Ziyaad Jacobs

Digital Technician
email: z.jacobs@ru.ac.za

Cynthia Donyeli

Messenger / Cleaner (Sculpture and Painting)

Nontle Kota

General Attendant
email: n.kota@ru.ac.za

Buyiswa Manyati

Messenger / Cleaner
email: buyiswa.manyati@ru.ac.za