Art Department

Elizabeth Perrill

Assistant Professor

Art History

B.A. with Honors, Grinnell College

M.A., Ph.D., Indiana University, Bloomington

Perrill received her Ph.D. in African Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington
and joined the UNCG Art Department in 2008. Her primary research areas
include South African contemporary art, Southern African ceramics and
Zimbabwean stone sculpture. Perrill's doctoral research focused on the
economic and aesthetic transformation of contemporary Zulu ceramics between
the 1960s and the 2000s.

As a tribute to the community of artists with whom she continues to work,
Perrill developed the catalog and touring exhibition Ukucwebezela: To Shine,
which has been featured at the African Art Center in Durban South Africa, the
Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College, the Indiana University Art Museum, and
UNCG's Gatewood Gallery. Perrill has continued her curatorial pursuits as a
consulting-curator of African Art with the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Perrill is committed to the use of focused life-histories as an ethical research
model that can integrate artists' contributions to the research process of art
historical research. As Zulu ceramic artists have guided conversations with
Perrill during extended interviews that began in 2004 she has responded to their
concerns that economic efficacy must be balanced with artistic expression. This
has, in turn, pushed Perrill to research and engage with the extended economic
networks, reaching across national boundaries, that have shaped ceramic arts in
South Africa.

In her current scholarship, Perrill is exploring cross-cultural comparisons between
ceramic art markets, namely South African and the American Southwest. She
is also interested in specificity of media and materiality in the South African art
world, as well as critical engagement with the theoretical writings of Nicholas
Bourriaud, Okwui Enwezor, and Salah Hassan, among others.