Thulile Gamedze is a Johannesburg-based cultural worker engaged in text, textile and history, and interested in the possibilities that emerge through the collapse of discipline. She has an M.Phil in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town and has published extensively in art and academic platforms in areas from contemporary art and Southern African art history, to the aesthetics of radical movements, the histories, politics and poetics of water, and pedagogical practices of the undercommons. Some of her significant art publications include the catalogues for Documenta 14, the 10th Berlin Biennale, and iterations of Recontres’ de Bamako, and her academic publications include the South Atlantic Quarterly, Radical Philosophy and MARCH: Journal of Art and Strategy. 

Through the workings of the 'aftercycle', Thuli's brand FOR THE AFTERLIFE experiments with found textile and one-of-one wear. FTA's close material work has ultimately prompted her broader practice, which is interested in the ghosts of the secondhand realm, and the formal, political, historic and social meanings in (soft) design. Her ongoing artistic and social history project After Library works these ideas into a collaborative reading and archival project engaging ongoing clothing loans. Having piloted in Johannesburg in 2025, the library brings together people with garment design, situated reading, and the documentation of practices of wear. 

Thuli was a member of iQhiya, a collective of Black women artists, who actively exhibited between 2015 and 2018, including at documenta14: Learning from Athens. She is part of an ongoing collaboration with her sibling Asher Simiso, with whom she works and writes as gamEdze and gamedZe. Alongside Abri de Swardt, Thuli is a collaborator in Overnight Services, a queer project engaging the illogics of dreaming as a generative voice for the disruption of museums' colonial order. Finally, performing as Ethan T. Smoke, Thuli forms part of the Johannesburg-based drag collective Jozi Kings and Things.