Saleem Al-Bahloly
Saleem Al-Bahloly received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Al-Bahloly is a fellow at EUME, a multi-disciplinary research program at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien (2014-2015), where he is working on a book about art and the critique of violence in the Arab world during the 1970s.
Emma Chubb
Emma Chubb is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, USA). Her dissertation research examines the complex relationship between national identity, visual representation, minority communities, and postcolonial migration in Morocco and its diaspora through the lens of contemporary art. Chubb’s fellowships and awards include the American Institute for Maghrib Studies Fellowship (2013-2014), Northwestern University Paris Program in Critical Theory Fellowship (2012-2013), Northwestern University Crown Family Middle East Research Travel Award (2011), and a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship for Arabic study in Amman, Jordan (2007). She has contributed to numerous curatorial, research, and publication projects in Morocco, Europe, Asia, and the United States, and has collaborated with L’appartement 22 (Rabat, Morocco) since 2007.
Clare Davies
Clare Davies is an Erwin Panofksy Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She lives currently in Cairo, where she is completing her dissertation on the modern Egyptian art object, and preparing to launch a working group dedicated to documenting and reflecting critically on the histories of contemporary art in Egypt. She was recently awarded the Irmgard Coninx Prize for Transregional Studies 2014-201515.
Sarah Dwider
Sarah Dwider is a current graduate student at the University of North Texas, Masters of Art History Program. She attended Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania where she completed a thesis on the intersection of art and politics in 20th century Egypt. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Art History. Her current research focuses on the development of modern Egyptian art, with a particular interest mid-century shifts in art policy and practices.
Tiffany Floyd
Tiffany Floyd is currently a Ph.D. student at Columbia University studying modern Iraqi art. While completing her Masters in Art History at the University of North Texas, Tiffany participated in the launching of the Modern Art Iraq Archive, an internet archive of texts and artworks pertaining to modern and contemporary Iraqi Art, and in the opening of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Before beginning her Ph.D. in the Fall of 2014, Tiffany was an adjunct faculty member of the University of North Texas, Texas Women’s University, and North Central Texas College. She was also the event and organization logistics coordinator for the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute (CAMCSI). Tiffany’s current research interests include the biographies and exhibition practices of the early pioneers of Iraqi modern art, the relationship between archaeology and the development of modern art in Iraq, and early movements of Iraqi art education. She is the current editor for the H-Net page of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey.
Jessica Gerschultz
Jessica Gerschultz is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Emory University in 2012. Gerschultz current book project, entitled Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École, examines materiality, gender, and transformations in artistic production during the late colonial and early postcolonial periods in Tunisia. Jessica has contributed to Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture (2014), African Art and Agency in the Workshop (2013) and other volumes in progress. She is presently writing articles on modern tapestry networks and the New Tapestry movement. Jessica has held fellowships and awards from the American Philosophical Society, the American Association of University Women, the U.S. Fulbright Council, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Qatar Museums Authority, and the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Internship Program at Emory University.
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the American University of Beirut. She studied modern Arabic literature at Oxford University (DPhil 2005) and comparative literature and Arabic studies at the Free University of Berlin (MA 2000). Her research interests are in modern and contemporary literature and art, interrelations of word and image, book art, collection and museum studies, gender studies, cultural memory and history. She is a member of the editorial board of “literatures in context,” a book series published by Reichert. Her publications include: reading across modern Arabic literature and art (Reichert, 2012); (ed. with John Pedro Schwartz), Museums, Archives and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (Ashgate, 2012); “Art and Political Dissent in Post-War Lebanon: Walid Sadek’s fi annani akbar min picasso [bigger than picasso],” IJMES 45.3 (2013): 535–60; "Contemporary Book Art in the Middle East: The Book as Document in Iraq," Art History 35/5 (2012); "The Forbidden Paradise. How Etel Adnan Learned to Paint in Arabic," and "On the Necessity of Writing the Present. Elias Khoury and ‘the Birth of the Novel’ in Lebanon," in: Arabic Literature. Postmodern Perspectives eds. Angelika Neuwirth, Andreas Pflitsch and Barbara Winckler (Saqi, 2010); (ed.), Writing a ‘Tool for Change’: ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif Remembered, MIT EJMES 7 (2007).
Holiday Powers
Holiday Powers is a Ph.D. student at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), where her research focuses on global modernisms and postcolonialism, with a particular concentration on Morocco and the Casablanca school. She has contributed to publications including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Higher Atlas/Au-Delà de l’Atlas: The Marrakech Biennale [4] in Context, and The Journal of North African Studies. She was the recipient of the Darat al Funun Dissertation Fellowship for the Study of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World (Amman, Jordan) and was the Artistic Program Coordinator and in charge of Parallel Projects for the fifth edition of the Marrakech Biennale.
Nadia Radwan
Nadia Radwan is a Swiss-Egyptian art historian specialized in modern Egyptian art who obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Geneva, Switzerland in 2013. Through her work as a consultant to the World Heritage Centre/UNESCO (2006-2007) and as a research assistant to the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva (2007-2013), she has been committed to the safeguarding and preservation of modern architectural heritage in the Middle East. In 2011, she received a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to pursue her research at the American University in Cairo and at the Egyptian National Archives. She is affiliated to a number of research projects including the COST action European Architecture Beyond Europe and the SNSF – Sinergia project Other Modernities: Patrimony and Practices of Visual Expression Outside the West. Radwan participated in the organization of exhibitions and cultural festivals in Switzerland and abroad, such as the Eternal Tour project in Neuchâtel and Jerusalem. She is the author of several articles on Egyptian modern art and architecture and her Ph.D. thesis is currently being translated into Arabic to be published by the National Centre of Translation in Egypt.
Sarah Rogers
Sarah Rogers is an independent scholar and founding president-elect of the Association of Modern & Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA). Her writings on modern and contemporary Arab art have been published in Arab Studies Journal, Parachute, Art Journal, American Art Review and numerous exhibition catalogues. She received her Ph.D. from the History, Theory, and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT in 2008.
Alexandra Dika Seggerman
Alexandra Dika Seggerman received her Ph.D. from the Yale University in 2014 and is the Five College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Art at Smith College. Her dissertation, "Revolution and Renaissance in Modern Egyptian Art, 1880-1960," was supported by a predoctoral fellowship at the American Research Center in Egypt. She has published articles on the Egyptian Surrealist Movement and the Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar.
Mena El-Shazly
Mena El-Shazly works with videos, photographs and installations to produce work dealing with themes such as “identity” and “substance abuse”, and their interaction together from a social and a political perspective. She studied Visual Art and Film at the American University in Cairo, graduating in 2013.
Mena worked as an archivist at the American University in Cairo focusing on Egyptian and Lebanese Cinema, and in Medrar for Contemporary Art, she was in charge of archiving low-budget and independent films for the Cairo Video Festival. In 2013, she exhibited “A Hail of Abuse”, a tapestry installation examining wine names that emerged in pre-Islamic poetry and their integration in the modern Egyptian society. In October 2014, Mena is joining Home Workspace Program (HWP) in Ashkal Alwan, Lebanon.
Tina Sherwell
Tina Sherwell lives in Jerusalem. She graduated from Goldsmiths’ College, London in Textiles and Critical Theory and received her Ph.D. from the University of Kent at Canterbury in Image Studies. She is currently the Director of Academic Programmes at The International Academy of Art Palestine. Her research interests include spatial practices, cityscapes and questions of location and identity in the work of Palestinian and artists from the Middle East. Previously she was Programme Leader of Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. She was also Executive Director of the Virtual Gallery at Birzeit University, and has worked on the Tate Online with their digital archives. She won the prize of Alexandria Biennale in 2001 for her map series. The author of various articles on Palestinian art published in catalogues, journals and books, including monograph on Sliman Mansour and curator of the retrospective exhibition: Terrains of Belonging in 2011. Recent publications include: Time Loop in Palestinian Video Art; Constellation of the Moving Image, Ed. B. Makhoul. Contemplation on Public Art in Palestine, Henrich Boell Foundation Kiel Muthesius, Germany (2012). Her most recent research focuses on the modalities of production and circulation of contemporary art from the Middle East discussed in Curatorial Expeditions: The Ramallah Safari presented at the Stedeljik Museum, Amsterdam.
Kirsten Scheid
Kirsten Scheid is an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at American University of Beirut. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University and her B.A. in Art History from Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests are the Anthropology of Art, Aesthetics, Art Historiography and Theory, Modernization and Cosmopolitanism, Affect, and Elites. She has conducted field and archival research since 1992 in Lebanon and Palestine. In 2009, Scheid was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, with its research program, “Europe in the Middle East, the Middle East in Europe.” Her research has been supported by the Palestinian American Research Center, the Barakat Trust, and the Issam Fares Institute. Kirsten has also contributed extensively to the art community, curating, exhibiting, writing in art journals and popular media, and founding both a cultural resource center and an Arabic children’s books line.
Nada Shabout
Nada Shabout is a Professor of Art History and the Director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Studies Initiative (CAMCSI) at the University of North Texas. She is the former Consulting Director of Research and long-term advisor at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, a former member of the Board of Governors of the Cultural Development Center of the Qatar Foundation. She led Mathaf’s curatorial team of the inaugural exhibition Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, and curated Interventions: A dialogue between the Modern and the Contemporary. Her teaching and writing interests are in the area of modern and contemporary Arab and Islamic visual culture, theory and history, imperialism, Orientalism and globalization. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA); the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics, University of Florida Press, 2007; co-editor with Salwa Mikdadi of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century, Thames & Hudson, 2009; and currently co-editing with Anneka Lenssen and Sarah Rogers the forthcoming volume of art writing from the Arab world, tentatively titled Arab Art in the Twentieth Century: Primary Documents, to be published as part of the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2017. She has co-curated with Zainab Bahrani Modernism and Iraq at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2009, and curated the traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, 2005-2009. Shabout is the founder and project director of the Modern ArtIraq Archive (MAIA). Her awards include: The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) fellow 2006, 2007; MIT visiting Assistant Professor, spring 2008, and Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, 2008 Lecture/Research fellowship to Jordan. She is a member of the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) and member of the International Editorial Advisory Board and subject editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (REM).
Samia Touati
Samia Touati received her Ph.D. an ethnography on Literature, Languages and Cultures from the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, King Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco (2004) and studied Cultural studies (MA 1997). Touati worked as an Adjunct Faculty Member at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar (1996-2010) where she taught various undergraduate courses, developed and taught course curriculum Comparative 20th Century Western and Arab Drama. A fluent speaker of Arabic, English and French, Touati edited and translated exhibitions catalogues and art-specialized articles as part of her work at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, contributed to writing artists profiles in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and served as an Member of the Editorial Board on social, cultural and historical content of forthcoming Museums in Qatar. Her research interests include oral histories, visual culture, ethnographies, interdisciplinary research and methodologies. Touati is the author of Literacy, Access to information and Development in Morocco during 1990s (University Press of America 2012), co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Gulf Poetry (Ithaca Press 2011), preface writer of Canvas of the Soul: Mystic Poems from the Heartland of Arabia (Toughra Books, 2012). Touati is currently working as a Research and Editorial Manager of the Mathaf Encyclopedia of Modern Art and Arab World (MEMAAW), a project initiated by Mathaf, contributing to the Arabic Art Glossary and writing artists’ profiles from Mathaf permanent collection.
