Dandara Maia is a research assistant at the Chair of Design Anthropology at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. She has been pursuing her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth since 2019, funded by the DAAD Graduate School Scholarship Programme (GSSP) and the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence. Her dissertation, Mapping African Prints: Following Africanness from Nigeria to the Brazilian Black Diaspora, investigates the African identity of wax prints, also known as ankara or African prints. Examining their entanglements with histories of trade, colonialism, design, and contemporary fashion practices, the dissertation explores how wax prints, which originated in Europe and were later imported to West Africa, become “African.”
Her work bridges design and anthropology, bringing into dialogue the social lives of textiles with their material dimensions. In her dissertation, she combines ethnographic fieldwork with material and visual analysis to unveil how fabrics circulate, acquire meaning, and shape identities across contexts. This combined perspective is rooted in her academic formation. She holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), where she initiated the research on wax prints examining their role as a political tool of Afro-Brazilian identity. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design from SENAI/CETIQT in Brazil, and her academic formation is complemented by a certificate in Textile Pattern Design, which grounds her theoretical work in material practice.
Her research interests and curatorial projects explore the intersections of material culture, decoloniality, and fashion theory, with a particular focus on African and Afro-Brazilian textile histories, as well as Yoruba cosmologies and epistemologies. She has collaborated with institutions including Iwalewahaus Bayreuth and Schloss Balmoral, where she developed curatorial projects on African and Afro-Brazilian art and fashion. At Linden-Museum Stuttgart, she conducted research on the wax prints archive and contributed to the museum’s digital collection. Her research and curatorial practice emphasize collaboration, decolonial approaches, and togetherness.
Publications:
“Ankara Prints in the Afro-Brazilian Diaspora”. In: ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America Bd. XXIV (2024), Nr.1
“Reclaiming tradition, fashioning citizenship: Ankara in contemporary Brazilian Afrocentric fashion”. In: International Journal of Fashion Studies Bd. 10 (2023), Nr. 2, S. 189–205
“11a Bienal de Berlim: questionando o eurocentrismo pela perspectiva do Sul”. URL https://projetoafro.com/editorial/artigo/11a-bienal-de-berlim-questionando-o-eurocentrismo-pela-perspectiva-do-sul/. — Projeto Afro
“O vestir político: as estampas wax hollandais como ferramentas de afirmação da identidade afro-brasileira”. In: dObra[s] – revista da Associação Brasileira de Estudos de Pesquisas em Moda Bd. 12 (2019), Nr. 25, S. 144–164
