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Celia de Villiers — South African artist, educator, curator and researcher. Her biography, full curriculum vitae and publications, in one place.

Celia de Villiers is a South African artist, educator, curator and researcher, and co-director of Ponte d’Arte, an international artists’ residency in Ponte da Mucela, Portugal.

She organically collages fibres and yarns, weaving together wire, glass and wood. She embroiders by hand and machine, and manipulates and eco-dyes fabric and paper to create works with rich surface textures. Her work spans large-scale 2D and 3D pieces incorporating textiles, glass, metal and resin, drawing on ancient myths and post-human fantasy.

Born in Johannesburg in 1946 and trained there and in Germany, she began as a batik artist — working on linen and cotton, drawing on fauna, flora and African folklore — and through early mural commissions her work came to hang in collections in some fourteen countries.

Her most recent projects address pressing ecological concerns — hydropolitics, wildfires and mycology — developed in dialogue with the Portuguese landscape she inhabits; her current research turns to the invisible intelligence and the strategies plants use to propagate and survive.

She has been awarded an art fellowship by the Sacatar Foundation of California, credited by the World Craft Council, and endorsed for curatorship by UNESCO. She holds an MA in Visual Arts (cum laude) and a BA Fine Arts from UNISA. She has exhibited extensively in South Africa and abroad, and her work is held in collections including the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Raiffeisen Bank (Germany), the Development Bank of Southern Africa and UNISA.