Anna van der Ploeg is a contemporary artist from South Africa, based in Brussels. She completed her Bachelor's Degree with Honours in Fine Arts at the Michalis School of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town and Master's degree at KASK Royal Academy of Art in Gent, where she was awarded the Leu de Legaat Award for Fine Arts. She has held solo exhibitions in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Brussels, Leuven, Melbourne and New York and participated in numerous group shows internationally. In 2023 she was the artist in residence at Museum M, Leuven and in 2024 at Reservoir Projects in Cape Town.

Anna van der Ploeg works primarily across the mediums of sculpture, painting, printmaking and writing. Her work is driven by an interest in societal imagination and finding new perspectives on the idea of community. Van der Ploeg's sculptures engage with ideas of authorship by the public, the human impulse to find concrete forms for speech and the representation of democratic order in objects.
Her practice is inextricably influenced by the experience of coming of age in South Africa as it renegotiated its national identity after the end of Apartheid in 1994, sensitizing her towards the imperative of finding oblique narratives and the importance of critical dialogue, mess, rejection and embrace.
Van der Ploeg’s practice is studio-based and embodied. Artworks emerge through constant exploration and thinking through labour-intensive and specialised working processes. She responds to commonplace and structural materials with a technical ability that allows her to transform them into something more like poetic device, imbued with a respect for artisanship. These processes track her immaterial research about the relationship between linguistic theory and form.