"The artwork is a site of undoing."
ABOUT RIZVANA BRADLEY
Rizvana Bradley is an internationally recognized theorist, art critic, and curator of academic arts symposia. Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She 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.
New Writing
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“Dispossession.”
Thinking from Black: A Lexicon. The Practicing Refusal Collective; Tina Campt, Kaiama L. Glover, Canisia Lubrin, Tavia Nyong’o, Christina Sharpe, Alexander Ghedi Weheliye (eds.). Macmillan, 2026.
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Loophole of Retreat
Simone Leigh (ed.). Pacific Books, 2026.
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“The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains.”
Glenn Ligon. Huey Copeland (ed.). October Files. MIT Press, 2026.
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“Martin Puryear: Refractions of the Historical Present.”
Martin Puryear: Nexus. Cleveland and New Haven: Cleveland Museum of Art, with distribution by Yale University Press, 2025.
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“Profane Illumination: On the Racial Limits of Documentary Realism.”
Film-Philosophy. Volume 29, Issue 2 (2025), pp. 380-400.
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“Choreographing Nothing: On Black Anteriority: Deborah-Joyce Holman and Rizvana Bradley in Conversation.”
e-flux (24 March 2025).
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Contributor to 52 Walker Special Edition Zine. Julius Eastman & Glenn Ligon: Evil Nigger Exhibition. January 23 – March 21, 2025. New York, New York.
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“Awaiting Her Verb: Simone Leigh’s Video Art.”
Simone Leigh. DelMonico Books and the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, 2023.
“Anteaesthetics offers a new interpretive framework for the philosophical interventions black art undertakes, stressing black art's negative power."
—The Yale Review
October 28, 2026
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA
November 20, 2026
Emory University
Atlanta, GA
January 7-10, 2027
Modern Language Association 2027
Los Angeles, CA
Dr. Bradley has curated events at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Galleries, London, the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.