Zoe Samudzi

Zoé Samudzi is a sociologist with a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco and an MSc in Health, Community, and Development from the London School of Economics. Her research is primarily concerned with German imperialism, the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, and settler colonialism in southern Africa (and coloniality across the continent more broadly). Other topics of research engagement includes visuality and violence, the ethics of seeing and witnessing, human remains and restitution, biomedicalization and ancestry, genocide memory and denialism, and the spatialities of racecraft and dispossession.

Samudzi is also an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, a popular magazine dedicated to pyschoanalytic thinking, and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents. For her work at Jewish Currents, she received a 2023 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Arts from the American Jewish Press Association for her review about the controversies around the most recent Philip Guston retrospective. She is an art critic and writer whose work has appeared in Artforum, the Funambulist, Protean Magazine, Errant Journal, The New Republic, Architectural Review, and other outlets. Currently, she has a Curatorial Research Fellowship with Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, she is an artist-in-residence with the Pressing Matter project in the Netherlands, and she was also the 2023 awardee for the Black Reconstruction Collective's artist prize.