Terry Kurgan is an artist and a writer based in Johannesburg. She makes work about photography.

Working with public and private image collections—and across writing, photography, installation and drawing—her work engages the conditions of photographic production; how and why a photograph originally came to be made and how it continues to affect and have meaning for those that now receive and view it. She is particularly interested in the complex collaborations between photographer and subject, and in the way that photography both records and invents the world.

Kurgan received her BAFA from the California School of Arts in San Francisco, her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and her MA in Creative Writing from Wits University in Johannesburg.

While she has always written and published in parallel to her body of visual arts work, she has more recently turned to creative non-fiction as her primary medium; writing with photography—to uncover haunting family histories that have been passed down through several generations.

Terry’s first book of creative non-fiction Everyone is Present was shortlisted for the Photo Arles Book Prize (France, 2019), selected as Finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards (USA, 2019), and won South Africa’s premier non-fiction literary prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award (2019).

She was a 2023 Bogliasco Foundation Literature Fellow, a 2018 Ampersand Foundation Visual Arts Fellow, and the recipient of several visual art honours, which include the 2000 FNB Vita Art Prize and the inaugural 2012 Mbokoda Photography Award. Her multimedia Hotel Yeoville project (2008-2012)—a participatory public art experiment—was shortlisted for the 2012 International Award for Public Art (IAPA).

Terry is currently a Research Associate at WiSER, The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand where she is at work on a new book circulating around photographs and their mutable afterlives, largely based upon her soldier/father’s 1948 Arab/Israeli war album.