William Kentridge

William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a South African artist working across drawing, film, theater, opera, tapestry, and sculpture. He studied politics and African studies at the University of the Witwatersrand before training in theater in Paris at the École Jacques Lecoq. He lives and works in Johannesburg.

His best-known work is a series of animated films — begun in 1989 — made through a singular process: drawing charcoal and pastel on paper, photographing each stage, erasing and redrawing within the same image, so that the marks of earlier states remain visible as the image evolves. This accumulation of erasure and revision produces a visual syntax for memory, historical violence, and the passage of time that is inseparable from the history of South Africa and from Kentridge's own position within it. The films follow recurring figures — the industrialist Soho Eckstein, the dreamer Felix Teitlebaum — through episodes that draw on Johannesburg's landscape and the moral weight of apartheid and its aftermath. His opera productions — including Wozzeck (ENO, 2017), The Nose (Metropolitan Opera, 2010), Lulu — are major institutional undertakings that carry his visual and theatrical preoccupations into the concert stage. His large-scale drawings, prints, and tapestries extend his investigation into political history, colonial representation, and the fragility of the documentary image.

He has been awarded honorary doctorates from numerous universities and his work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and institutions across the world.