About

Camilla Pontiggia (b. 1989, Johannesburg, MAFA with distinction, University of The Witwatersrand) is an artist and filmmaker based in South Africa. Her transdisciplinary mode of work crosses fluidly between film, sound, installation, textile, photography, performance, and writing. Using an embodied and narrative approach, her practice often takes as a departure point her experience of growing up between South Africa and Italy. Using this multicultural and multilingual heritage, Pontiggia thinks with and through gut sensations in search of alternative forms of knowing, being, doing, and resisting that might offer a counterpoint to Western normative options. This search for creative alternatives at the intersection of art and social issues is a recurring theme across Pontiggia’s work. Her video art has featured in Afrocartography (2013), Mwenya Kabwe’s theatre production centred around forced migration and the African Diaspora. Pontiggia’s documentaries have tackled human trafficking, gender-based violence, and policy challenges faced by black and brown women in corporate South Africa. Her performances have wrestled with coloniality’s reach across the fabric of society, with the intersectional nature of systemic injustice, and with gentrification. Pontiggia is a winner of the Womxn To Watch Award, and a finalist for the Tierney Photography Fellowship (with Special Mention). She is an alumnus of the 2020 Jumpstart Scriptlab (DIFF) for her screenplay The Missionaries, and was awarded KZN Film Commission’s 2021 slate funding in partnership with Jayan Moodley’s Urban Vision, for her screenplay IGGANG. Solo exhibitions include Mending A Kitchen Table (2025, META Foundation, Johannesburg), and Things I Found Nelle Viscere (2024), which showed at The Point of Order in Johannesburg (South Africa), The University of Padua’s historic Museum of Geography (Italy) and the Municipal Library of Vobarno (Italy). In 2023 her photographic series whitenoisewhitegirl was part of the Pingyao Photography Festival (China) and the Quanzhou Photography Biennale (China). Documentaries include #Am I Next? (2021), commissioned by E.TV, and Rise Black Ocean (2019), which screened at film festivals in London and Accra.