Grada Kilomba is a Portuguese interdisciplinary artist and writer living in Berlin. Her work draws on memory, trauma, race, gender, and the 'post-colonial condition,' and has been presented internationally. She has been featured at renown venues, such as the 32. Bienal de São Paulo 2016, Rauma Biennal Balticum 2016, ArtBasel 2016, ArtFair Cape Town, Secession Museum in Vienna, Bozar Museum in Brussels, Kampnagel in Hamburg, Münchner Kammerspiele, Wits Theatre in Johannesburg, among others.
She is best known for her unconventional writing and her ‘subversive use of artistic practices, bringing text into performance, and giving body, voice and image to her own writings’ - using a variety of formats from video installations, to staged readings, to performances, to text collage, and to three dimensional and sound installations.
In 2011, she was awarded as one of »The Most Inspirational Black Women in Europe« by the BWIE, and in 2013, she was named as »Woman of Excellence« by the Sonne Magazine. Since 2017, the artist is represented by the acclaimed Goodman Gallery, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
She holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Free Universität Berlin, and she has been a visiting lecturer at several international universities, and last was a Professor at the Humboldt Universität Berlin, department of Gender Studies. She is the author of Plantation Memories (2008), a compilation of episode of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories; and the co-editor of Mythen, Subjekt, Masken (2005), a pioneer anthology on critical whiteness studies.
