Senzeni Marasela is a multimedia artist whose practice weaves together embroidery, video, photography, and performance to explore post-apartheid South African identity, womanhood, and the psychic textures of grief and memory. She is perhaps best known for her ongoing engagement with the historical figure of Sarah Baartman, using embroidery and performative repetition to honour lives erased by colonial history. Marasela's work is both politically committed and deeply intimate, and her Ampersand Fellowship year provided crucial international exposure during a formative period of her practice.
The Ampersand Fellowship
Since 1997, the Ampersand Foundation has sent more than 300 South African visual artists to a funded residency in Tribeca, New York — connecting them with one of the world's most dynamic art ecosystems.