About
Judy Ann Seidman
Judy Seidman was born in Norwalk, Connecticut in 1951, Her family moved to Ghana, West Africa when she was 11. She went to secondary school in Ghana, then to university in Madison Wisconsin, receiving a BA in sociology, and an MFA in fine arts (painting), in 1972. She went to Lusaka, Zambia to visit her parents in 1972, and stayed there; working as a visual artist, and marrying Q Neil Parsons; moving to Swaziland in 1975. She then worked for five years in Swaziland, as a visual artist; teaching art at the Thokoza school for refugees from the 1976 Soweto Uprising, and exhibiting with South African sculptor and poet Pitika Ntuli. She published a book of her drawings about the struggle against Apartheid, called BayeZwa (The People Live in IziZulu) in 1979. Her first child was born in 1978, and her second in 1981.
In December 1980 Judy moved to Gaborone, Botswana, and joined Medu Art Ensemble, an art-making collective aimed at creating culture to build the liberation struggle in South Africa. Her marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1980s. Her work with Medu continued until the organisation was destroyed by the South Africa Defence Force in the Gaborone Raid on June 14, 1985.
After the 1985 raid Judy remained in Gaborone, working as a “day job” with the newspaper Mmegi wa Dikgang, as a visual artist in her own time, and within the South African liberation movement. In 1987 her children moved to London with her ex-husband, after his house in Gaborone was petrol-bombed. In 1989 the Botswana authorities asked her to leave, since her ANC connections were viewed as a threat to her safety. She then lived in Zimbabwe for 9 months, until negotiations between the ANC and the South African government, and the unbanning of the liberation movements, made it possible to move to Johannesburg.
She now lives in Johannesburg, working as a painter and visual artist, and facilitating visual arts workshops mostly with women activists. She was diagnosed with HIV in 1990 – another long struggle. In 2007 she published a book called Red on Black, the story of the South African poster movement. In 2019 she published her autobiography, Drawn Lines.
