About The Artist

Artist Biography

Franci Cronjé is a Cape Town-based educator and academic, with special interests in media production ranging from video to photography. She has a wide range of educational management experience particularly in the field of the creative industries. Her experience and creative skills set, combined with her educational studies in creativity, youth identity and critical studies effectively enable her to apply practical knowledge of the arts to teaching and learning on a practical as well as theoretical level.

Her practical media production experience initiated when she established herself as a photographer in 1980, and worked on a full time basis for the SABC, Panorama Magazine and the Department of Teaching support at the Technikon Pretoria. At the latter, she was responsible for the production of visual teaching aids with photography and video, and assisted with pedagogical induction of new lecturers into the field of teaching and learning. Over a number of years, she has also freelanced as photographer for a number of publications, such as Sarie, Garden and Home and SA Interior design.

Her academic career started in 1997 when she enrolled for a BA Fine arts degree at the University of Pretoria, and completed it in 2000. Her MA(FA) was obtained at the University of the Witwatersrand with a dissertation investigating the problems that New Media Art create in the Fine Art Gallery context within South Africa. This Masters dissertation that was awarded the Innovative ETD (open format) Award at the International NDLTD Conference in 2005 showed her knack for initiating new ways to introduce knowledge and academic material.

Her multidisciplinary PhD studies initiated under the supervision of Prof Jonathan Jansen at the Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria, where she read in Education Pedagogy and Policy with specific focus on Media and Video production in education. During this time, she worked in a scholarship at the Meraka institute of the CSIR and defended her PhD proposal at the UP. After relocating to Cape Town, she registered and graduated with her PhD in June 2011 from the Centre for Film and Media Studies under the supervision of Dr Arlene Archer at the University of Cape Town.

Cronje joined the lecturing team at Vega School of Brand Leadership in Cape Town in June 2009 and has led the academic team on this campus as Head of Academic affairs from February 2010 to September 2012, as well as serving as Head of the Critical Studies subject across all four Vega Campuses. Within this time, she headed particular Teaching and Learning investigations into improving Student Attendance, Academic Literacy Skills, Anti-Plagiarism initiatives and curriculum development not only for the Critical Studies modules, but also new developments of Higher Certificates in Creative Brand Communications and Business Management. As Field Navigator of Critical Studies, she integrated the Acceleration programme into the CS1 and CS2 curricula. After only one semester, this development already showed an average national increase of 3% and 5% respectively. The redesign of all five modules for 2012 and beyond promises to synergise Critical Studies and the other subjects in the CBC- and BBM degrees even more proficiently.

Vocational history:

Running her own film, video and stills photography production and consultation business from 1994, she also worked as television filmmaker, producing and directing inserts for 50/50, Ecovision, Grab, and Let’s Go. She supervised Senior Research Projects for Film Production at the UCT Centre for Film and Media Studies, tutored as well as presented a seminar series on South African

Video Art during this two-year period. Additionally, she conducted courses in video production at grassroots level as well as conducting annual educational workshops across South Africa for the SASOL New Signatures Art Competition. During 2006, she curated the establishment of an art collection for the Department of Science and Technology situated in their new building on the CSIR campus in Pretoria, while working towards her PhD degree.

She also actively produced her own artwork for group art exhibitions. She published art reviews in Beeld newspaper and ArtSouthAfrica Magazine on a regular basis.

She participated in the SASOL New Signatures Art Competition in 1997, 2000 and 2001, the 100xC month of photography in Cape Town in 1999, the Cape Town Month of Photography in 2002, and various smaller exhibitions in Pretoria from 1997.

Art curation:

Since 2003 to the 2009, she acted as Chairman and permanent member of the selection and judging committee for the National SASOL New Signatures Art Competition. She conducted annual workshops in the nine collection centers, where she briefed young artists on the aims and strategies of the competition. During 2006 and 2007 she has also curated a new permanent art collection for the Government Department of Science and Technology coinciding with their move to a new building on the grounds of the CSIR in Pretoria.

During May 2004, her solo exhibition titled About Guilt was hosted by the Premises Gallery in the Civic Theatre complex as partial fulfillment of her Masters degree in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Video (art and documentary):

Her video work has been shown in Ekanterinburg, Russia; Centrum voor Jonge Kunst, Gent; as well as at the ‘International Shorts’, California State University, Chico, during 2004-5, and at the Spanierman Gallery in New York during May/June 2007.

During 2005 she filmed a documentary programme of the ‘Patricia Glyn walk of Discovery’, covering an expedition from Durban to the Victoria Falls. Since completion, she designed and compiled a multimedia show forming part of Patricia Glyn’s motivational talk. She has been authoring DVD’s for the last three years, including an international conference compilation for the annual iCommons Summit 2006 in Rio de Janeiro.

Community profile:

Together with her husband Prof. Johannes Cronjé, she has run a University of Pretoria 300-strong male residence for six years, with the particular challenge of integrating different social and racial groups in one environment.

QUALIFICATIONS