Tegan Bristow
Tegan Bristow is an Interactive Media Artist and Lecturer at the Digital Arts Division of the Wits School of the Arts, in Johannesburg South Africa. Bristow work is either arts, technology or development orientated. Outside of lecturing, Bristow spends time helping develop and encourage a local technology arts scene. Often this means helping someone make something work, but it also means research and project development.
Tegan Bristow holds an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts, painting to be specific. In the Honours year of this degree she became very interested in computers and coding and started teaching herself how to code and work creatively with computers. This led her to a Master's Degree in Interactive Digital Media at Wits with the Digital Arts Division of the Wits School of Arts in 2007.
Following her graduation, Tegan was hired by Wits to run this same MA program and has been running it and other initiatives in this field at Wits for the last ten years. In this time Tegan was also fortunate to develop her own creative career as an interactive digital media artist and as a researcher in the field. In 2012 she started her PhD focusing specifically on understanding and unpacking the role of culture and technology in Africa. This took her on a five-year research trajectory that explores cultures of technology in Africa, with particular focus on Nairobi and Johannesburg as cases. This research led not only to her completed dissertation, but an important exhibition produced with the Goodman Gallery titled "Post African Futures" and further development of platforms for showing and engaging African Digital Cultures. Though still employed by Wits, she is since 2016 the Director of the Fak'ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival.
