Rizvana Bradley

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. She is the 2023–24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Bradley is the author of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE. Anteaesthetics 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, TDR: The Drama Review, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Film Quarterly, 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.

Born in Kenya, and raised in the U.K., Germany, Poland, Tanzania, and the U.S., Bradley’s research and teaching focuses on the study of aesthetic theory at the intersections of film and media, contemporary art, literature, and performance. 

Before coming to UC Berkeley, Bradley was an Assistant Professor in the History of Art and African American Studies at Yale, an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality at Emory University, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at the University College London. 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.