Leora Maltz-Leca is Professor of Contemporary Art, and Head of Theory and History of Art and Design at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. She is the author of William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and Other Doubtful Enterprises (Univ. of California, 2018) and has written for Artforum, Frieze, African Arts, Art South Africa, ArteEast as well as Art Bulletin, where she chaired the journal’s editorial board from 2018-2021. She was born and raised in Durban, South Africa, and was educated at Yale, Brown and Harvard (BA, MA, AM, PhD). Maltz-Leca is currently working on a book titled The Metaphoric Studio: Contemporary Art In and Out of the Postcolonies.

In 2017 Maltz-Leca founded the Redwood Contemporary Arts Initiative, expanding the institution’s longtime exhibition program to include a series of pointed engagements with global contemporary art, that range from exhibitions and site-specific installations, to lectures and symposia. In June 2018, the RCAI launched the Material Politics initiative, commissioning  Pascale Marthine Tayou to create Newport’s first site-specific memorial to slavery, Remember Bimbia. Since then, the RCAI has presented site-specific installations, and site-responsive exhibitions of the work of Kevin Dacey, Russell Lee, Per Barclay and Jocelyn Prince.