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Grada Kilomba

Portuguese artist and academic psychologist

  • 6 min read
  • 4 chapters

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Life

Grada Kilomba was born in Lisbon and is of West African descent (São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola). In Lisbon, she studied clinical psychology and psychoanalysis at the Instituto de Psicologia Aplicada (ISPA). While practicing as a psychologist in Portugal, she worked in psychiatry with war-traumatised people from Angola and Mozambique and initiated various artistic and therapeutic projects on trauma and memory as well as on the work of Frantz Fanon. Grada Kilomba received a scholarship from the Heinrich Böll Foundation to pursue her PhD, which she completed in 2008 at the Free University of Berlin where she also worked as a guest lecturer.

From 2009 to 2010, she was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. In subsequent years, she taught post-colonial studies, psychoanalysis, and the work of Frantz Fanon at various universities, including the Free University of Berlin, Bielefeld University, and the University of Ghana. She was also Professor of Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin. There she conducted research on African diasporas, among other topics, and taught on decolonial feminism, decolonizing knowledge, and performing knowledge. She gives lectures in Europe and continuously exhibits her art in a variety of different group and solo exhibitions.

Kilomba has commented on how early experiences of racism in post-fascist Portugal in the 1970s and 1980s shaped her world perceptions. In 2009, German Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung commented: "Her literary work combines post-colonial discourse and lyrical prose on the traces of slavery, colonialism and everyday racism".

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