Anitra Nettleton is Chair and Director of the Centre for Creative Arts of Africa at the Wits Art Museum (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). She was Professor of History of Art in Wits School of Arts from 1998 to 2011. She has published articles in international and local journals, chapters in books and books. She has also regularly presented papers at local and international conferences and chaired many conference sessions. Her research encompasses topics in historical and contemporary African arts and is currently focused on late 19^th and early 20^th Century South African beadwork, and mid-20^th Century black modernist artists. 

As an art historian with an anthropological bent, I am interested in the ways in which modernity is manifested in the arts and cultures of peoples in Southern Africa. My interest in the works of mid-twentieth-century black South African artists is centred on their creation of specifically African, South African modernisms. In the work of Sidney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae and Dumile Feni (among others), trained in the tenets of ‘free art’, African identity is espoused as modern phenomenon. It has therefore been contrasted with the work of other, supposedly untrained artists, such as Jackson Hlungwane, whom I argue are equally modernist.