Gigi Konecki-Brazeal

Sarah "Gigi" Konecki-Brazeal is a graduate student in art history at Arizona State University whose research and studio practice are unified by a single preoccupation: the body as a site of meaning-making across time. Her thesis examines ancient Egyptian tattooing, from the predynastic Gebelein mummies through the Middle Kingdom, deploying Alfred Gell's framework of art as social agency to argue that tattooing has been not merely overlooked but structurally excluded from art history's canonical frameworks, an exclusion she identifies as a colonial inheritance. Her broader scholarly aim is to investigate how ancient humans used the body as a site of devotion, ritual, and culture, and to build an art-historical methodology adequate to see it.

Konecki-Brazeal is an active member of the Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research Project in Gazipaşa, Turkey, where she serves as field assistant and trench supervisor, and a member of the Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project at ASU, where she works in the lithics lab and produces academic illustrations. Her fieldwork informs her studio practice directly: stratigraphy, material, and the physical record of human habitation all find their way into her textile and sculptural work. She is also available for archaeological illustration on a contract basis.