Ledelle Moe was born in Durban, South Africa in 1971. She studied sculpture there at Technikon Natal and graduated in 1993. Active in the local art community, Moe was one of the founding members of the FLAT Gallery, an artist initiative and alternative space in Durban. A travel grant in 1994 took her to the United States where she embarked on a period of study at the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Sculpture Department Master’s program. She completed her Master’s Degree there in 1996 and soon after accepted an adjunct position in the Sculpture Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. Later she taught at the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, DC, Virginia Commonwealth University and St.Mary’s College of Maryland. Moe has exhibited in a number of venues including the Kulturhuset (Stockholm, Sweden) the NSA Gallery (Durban, South Africa), the International Sculpture Center (Washington, DC), The Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC) and American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY. In 2002 Moe was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Award and in 2008 Kreeger Museum Artist Award. Throughout this time Moe remained strongly connected to South Africa, returning to visit annually. In 2013 she has returned to live and work in South Africa and teach at Stellenbosch University. Projects include large-scale concrete installations at Socrates Park in New York City, African Museum of Art in Washington DC, Biennale Internationale D’Art, Martinique, Perez Museum, Miami, Semaphore Gallery in Neuchatel, Switzerland, Biennale De Dakar, Dakar, Senegal and MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, USA.

Mieke Hall is a lecturer in the Visual Communication Design division. She has a strong passion for social impact, where embodied design interventions can lead to real-world change. She teaches across different specialities, including illustration, graphic design, animation, drawing, and campaign design. 

 She completed her BA in Visual Communication Design (2010) and MA in Visual Arts (2015) at Stellenbosch University and is currently completing her PhD, From Semiotic Landscape to Material Terrain: Co-creating an Inclusive Primary School Classroom through Art and Design Practices in a South African Context. Her research is situated within postqualitative and new materialist frameworks and explores how material, spatial, and relational forces together shape diversity and inclusivity in primary school classrooms. Her work is driven by a commitment to inclusive education, creative research methodologies, and the ongoing entanglement between theory, practice, and pedagogy. 

 Alongside her academic work, Mieke is a practising artist and freelance illustrator and designer. She has illustrated numerous published children’s books and has collaborated with a range of corporate clients, including United Airlines, Checkers, Durbanville Hills, Blaauwklippen Wine Estate, Exclusive Books, Ideas Magazine, Taalgenoot, and Huisgenoot Magazine, among others. She has also participated in both local and international solo and group exhibitions.

Mariambibi Khan is a contemporary jeweller, maker, and lecturer whose work brings together craft, creativity, and critical reflection. She is a full-time lecturer in the Creative Jewellery and Metal Design Division at Stellenbosch University, where she has taught since 2018, and holds a Master of Visual Arts in Jewellery Design (cum laude) from the same institution. 

In 2024, she was featured in The Nature of Imperfection, a publication produced with the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston, for the Jewellery and Adornment celebration. Since then, she has participated in multiple national and international exhibitions. Her research positions contemporary jewellery as a space for the reinterpretation and affirmation of Islamic feminine identity, faith, and spirituality within a multicultural South African context. 

Working within contemporary jewellery as both a material and conceptual practice, Mariambibi challenges conventional notions of adornment by foregrounding narrative, identity, and process. Rooted in hand-based techniques, including jewellery-making, knitting, and embroidery, her work values slowness and intentional engagement with materials such as textiles, cotton, and metal. 

She approaches her practice holistically, connecting making, teaching, and research to foster personal growth and contribute to thoughtful, supportive creative communities. 

Stella Viljoen is Vice-Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She is an associate professor in Visual Studies. She has degrees in History of Art and Media Studies. Prof Viljoen has written widely on representational cultures and how these index gender norms and political aspirations. In particular she has documented the history of the men’s press in South Africa, starting from the early twentieth century to the present. Her research has covered early South African soft-porn as well as men’s magazines from the Global North like GQ and Playboy. She has a perverse interest in the capitalist imagination and the interrogation of art, design and media as conduits of social conformity but also mechanisms for radical resistance. She is currently researching the ways in which feminism is still useful as a theoretical lens, both in the creation and interpretation of art and media. Her research maps the ways feminism might be evolving.   

Her teaching and research are constantly in conversation. She teaches undergraduate courses on art historical movements like a course on the Cult of the Romantic Sublime. She also offers an undergraduate course on the rise of modernity in Euro-America-and-Africa and a course on the representation of masculine subjectivities in the media called ‘Spunk’. Her current Honours course is focused on Afropresentism, a phenomenon that asks how Africa-centred identity and embodiment is articulated in an age of Big Data and digital disembodiment. It aims to name and understand the politics of the present as a step towards reparation. Through critical engagement with cultural production the course explores Africa Now as a means of anticipating and preparing for what is to come.  

She works with students from a wide array of fields whether Sociology, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Art History, Gender Studies, Media Studies or an interdisciplinary combination of these. She coordinates the PhD programme in Visual Art.  

She is a fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. 

Maria is an educator and illustrator with a passion for picturebooks and visual storytelling. She is a lecturer within the Visual Communication Design division at Stellenbosch University, primarily focusing on illustration, drawing and narrative-driven projects.  

Maria completed her BA in Information Design at the University of Pretoria in 2008, followed by an Mphil in Visual Arts specialising in Illustration at the University of Stellenbosch, graduating Cum Laude in 2013. Most recently, she has completed her PhD in Art and Design at the University of Johannesburg, with a thesis focused on a practice-based investigation of wordless narratives. Maria is passionate about picturebook research within the broader streams of education, cultural and media studies. She has an avid interest in illustration as a form of practice-based research, as well as the interdisciplinary intersection of illustration with fields such as ethnography and reportage.  

Alongside her academic work, Maria is a practicing freelance illustrator, working under the name Maria Lebedeva. She has illustrated multiple picturebooks for local and international publishers and has worked on diverse projects creating illustrations for editorials, branding, packaging and stationery. She has exhibited her work widely, participating in both solo and group exhibitions.