holds the position of junior professor for media theory at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since April 2016. She studied photography, film, cultural studies and media theory at Bennington College, USA and Humboldt University, Berlin. From 2008 to 2011 she was a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and from 2014–2016 researcher at the interdisciplinary laboratory Image|Science|Gestaltung at Humboldt University. Her PhD Affective Images of Post-Apartheid. Documentary Perspectives on Migration, Xenophobia and Gender in South African Film and Photography (2015) was funded by the DFG and nominated for the Humboldt-Award. From 2015 to 2018 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, in the FWF project ‘A Matter of Historicity. Material Practices in Audiovisual Art’. She curated the photography exhibit ‘Now you see me, now you don’t’ for the National Theatre of Mannheim and directed several essayistic films. Kesting is part of the publishing collective b_books, Berlin since 2004 and has become a member of the editorial board of FKW journal for visual culture and gender studies in 2017. She writes for Texte zur Kunst, Social Dynamics and FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, among others. A recent publication is "Changing Visual Politics in South Africa," in Anne Graefer, Media and the Politics of Offence (2019).