Nathaniel Sheppard III (b. 1989, Chicago, IL, USA) is a Black South African-American visual artist and printmaker, based in Johannesburg. Sheppard’s formative years were spent in Chicago and Los Angeles, where he pursued his studies in architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC). He immigrated to Johannesburg, South Africa where he enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) to study Fine Arts. It was at WITS that he found a keen interest in printmaking.

Sheppard worked at David Krut Projects, learning more advanced techniques in printmaking and shadowing printmakers such as Jillian Ross on projects for a few prominent artists where he assisted in the carving and Printing of the “Mantegna” Woodblock print edition of the Triumphs and Laments series by William Kentridge.

Observing and applying the collective practice ethos of printmaking in South Africa, particularly in how printmaking afforded South Africans the autonomy to control the means of their production; for example the printing of struggle posters/t-shirts/banners and other media on the struggle, Sheppard is a master printmaker that often prints the work of the most well-known Southern African artists.

Sheppard co-founded Danger Gevaar Ingozi Studio in 2016 with Anaz Mia, Sbongiseni Khulu, and Chad Cordeiro whose foundation was built on the independent publishing of prints and an emphasis on the value of the labour of a printmaker concerning the value of the work they produce in line with South African history in particular, and the traditions of printmaking and craft based practices.

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