Associate Professor Brett Pyper

Associate Professor Brett Pyper is an interdisciplinary South African arts practitioner, cultural scholar and former festival director. Since the early 1990s, he has combined critical arts practice with academic study at local, national and international levels. As Head of the Wits School of Arts (WSOA) from 2014 to 2021, he was the founding Principle Investigator of the Arts Research Africa project, which explores practice-based arts research from the Global South. He is now based in the WSOA department in the process of being renamed Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures. He also leads a research cluster on the arts, culture and heritage as knowledge production supported by the NIHSS-BRICS Think Tank, and codirects the Re-centring AfroAsia project. In the global public sphere, he serves as a mentor for The Festival Academy, which trains young festival managers worldwide, also providing a professional network for senior festival managers and arts leaders.