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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 served as the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where she taught courses on Horror and the Cinematic Unconscious, Political Depression and the Aesthetics of Sovereignty, and Art, Race, and Media Poetics.
Bradley's research spans Aesthetic Theory, Black Critical Theory, Contemporary Art, Continental Philosophy, Film Theory, and Race and the Philosophy of Media. Her work examines how Black art deconstructs aesthetic forms foundational to modernity, with particular attention to questions of race, gender, and representation. She approaches these themes through explorations of affect theory, its interlocutors, and its critics, with emphasis on what Sianne Ngai terms 'minor feelings' and 'negative affects' in their racial and gendered dimensionality.
Her critically acclaimed book Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023) was named a Best Book of the Year by Frieze Magazine and shortlisted for the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. The book moves across multiple histories and artistic mediums—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—to inaugurate ante-formalism, a new method for interpretation that demonstrates black art's recursive deconstruction of aesthetic forms foundational to modernity.
- Advisory Board member of October
- Advisory Board member of Camera Obscura
Bradley's scholarly articles appear in Diacritics, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Discourse, and TDR: The Drama Review. Her art criticism has been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, and Parkett, as well as in exhibition catalogs for major institutions including the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.
Bradley has curated numerous academic arts symposia at institutions including the British Film Institute, Serpentine Galleries, and Stedelijk Museum of Art. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She holds a PhD from Duke University and was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
