M. Neelika Jayawardane is Professor of English at a public university in Upstate New York, and a Senior Research Associate at The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She was born in Sri Lanka, raised in Zambia, and completed her university education in the US. Her research is centred on Southern Africa, and her scholarly publications focus on the nexus between written texts, visual art, photography, and the transnational/transhistorical implications of imperial ventures and ongoing forms of apartheid.

Jayawardane was a recipient of the 2018 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a book project on Afrapix, a South African photographers’ agency that operated during the last decade of apartheid. She completed a critical writing residency at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2021, and received support from the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for an interdisciplinary project examining photography from Sri Lanka’s civil war period, titled, “This is not the correct history.” In 2023, she was a writing fellow at The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) at the University of Johannesburg. Along with academic publications and longform essays for museum exhibitions and artists’ books, her writing has been featured in Al Jazeera English, Hyperallergic, Transition, Aperture, frieze,The South African Mail & Guardian, and other venues.