Anna was formerly an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Programme student at the Pitt Rivers Museum and University of Brighton, supervised by Prof Darren Newbury and Dr Julia Winckler (Brighton) and Prof Christopher Morton (Oxford), which she completed in 2025. Anna previously studied for a BA in Modern History and International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, and an MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society at the University of Cambridge.
Anna’s doctoral project ‘Who Invites the Archive Home? Animating a 1930s queer South African photographic collection through collaborative filmmaking’ contended with a previously unstudied collection of photographs made by Irene ‘Freddie’ Heseltine (1892-1980) in 1930s South Africa, now archived at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Heseltine’s photographs depicted a complex world of fledgling socialism, white voyuerism, queer belonging, and the South African landscape as a site of both aspiration and extraction. The collection’s historical ambiguities and re-placement in contemporary South Africa offered nuanced perspective on what kind of history photographs produce. In search of whether and how these photographs might find meaning in South Africa today, Anna partnered with queer South African filmmaker Robyn Phillips to create the short film Seasons of Longing, which imagined the moments before and after Heseltine’s photographs. Throughout the film collaboration and subsequent public engagements across South Africa and the U.K., the collection transformed into a ‘queer’ ‘African’ ‘archive’ and sparked discussions about queer representation, colonial archives, cross-hemisphere community collaboration, the value of museums, and film as immersive storytelling practice.
Anna was Executive Producer and Researcher for Seasons of Longing, which was screened at festivals in both the UK and South Africa, and won Best Short Film and Best Cinematography at South Africa’s largest independent film festival in 2024. It was also nominated for Best Director and Best Editor. It is now free to view on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/944943935
