Name: Nancy Dantas

Professional Category: Postdoctoral Researcher (IHA Fellowship)

Research Project: Constellation B: Coordinates, mobility and overlapping worlds

Supervisor: Joana Cunha Leal (IHA-NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)

Thematic areas: Modernism, Colonialism; Cultural transfers, African art

Position within IHA: SC Member | RG Member [Art Theory, Historiography, and Criticism]

Contact: nidantas@fcsh.unl.pt

CIÊNCIA ID: A617-9E42-DBA2

ORCiD: 0000-0003-0715-4304

Biography

I am a Johannesburg-born art historian with Portuguese ancestry. My research interests pivot on rethinking and re-engaging archives. I am broadly concerned with multiple modernisms, transnational networks, coeval contemporaries, and making history’s silences and omissions speak. I am intentional in my research of under-studied and obscured figures, particularly women, and their role in modernist art history—be they artists, gallerists, curators, museum staff—and their attendant stories of resilience, defiance, and resistance. 

I received my PhD in Art History from Rhodes University in 2021. Titled An Archive of Upset: The Shift from Commissioning to Curating through South Africa’s Representations at the Bienal de São Paulo and the Interstitial Nexus of Leonard Tshehla Mohapi Matsoso, my thesis, produced under the supervision of Dr Ruth Simbao, examines the shift from commissioning to curating through the lens of South Africa’s participation at the São Paulo Biennial, contributing towards the nascent field of African exhibition histories, and the practice of reading the archive against the grain and on the margins, in search of elusive ghosts that haunt dispersed and dismembered modern colonial state and para-statal archives. Between 2020 and 2023, I was the C-MAP Africa Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. I am currently an Honorary Research Associate at Rhodes University, Department of Fine Art, Makhanda, South Africa.

(data supplied by the researcher)

Abbreviations:
SC – Scientific Council; RG – Research Group