Professor Dr. Carla Liesching

Biography

Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in South Africa and Ithaca, NY. She works in the fields of photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking, and design, drawing upon her experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa. Her work engages with themes of representation, knowledge, power, and the enduring constructions of race and geography. Liesching's practice critically examines dominant forms of knowledge production and addresses the fragmented, contested, and subjective nature of understanding. Notably, she is the author of "Good Hope," a hybrid image-text memoir that chronicles centuries of struggle against empire and was shortlisted for the Aperture Paris-Photo Book Award. Liesching contributed to the collective work "Whiteness: Racial Imaginary Institute," which explores the ideologies surrounding whiteness. She has exhibited her work both domestically and internationally, including upcoming exhibitions at PhMuseum in Bologna and the Deutsche Börse Foundation in Frankfurt. Liesching serves as a Lecturer in the Department of Art at Cornell University and Ithaca College and is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography, actively engaging in education focused on visual literacy and self-publishing as tools for empowerment.

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