Photo by Ali

Photo by Ali

 
 
 

I am a writer, curator and art historian. I am currently Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) at the University of British Columbia. I have contributed essays and criticism to numerous artists’ catalogues, publications, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, including ArtForum, Frieze, Bidoun, and The Funambulist. I am a recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Fulbright award. I have taught at Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, the Cooper Union, The New School, and National College of the Arts (NCA), and mentored artists and curators. I have lectured and presented my research internationally at venues including King’s College, Cambridge University, The Cooper Union, New York University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Sharjah March Meeting.

Previously, I was Curator, International Art at the Tate Modern, where I worked on exhibitions, displays and acquisitions, to think critically about museum collections and expanded the representation of marginalized artists from around the world. I was both a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of History and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in Transnational Asian Studies. I earned my PhD from Cornell University in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Studies and an MArch from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2018-2021, I was the Instructor for Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP). I am myself an alumnus of the Whitney ISP, where I was supervised by the late Okwui Enwezor and Sarah Lookofksy.

My scholarship focuses on transregional histories of modernism and contemporary art across South and West Asia and the United States and Europe. My research interests include histories of art, architecture and decolonization, art and activism, race and racialization, migration and diaspora, gender and sexuality, and black and postcolonial thought.

My current book project is about the artists Zarina, Nasreen Mohamedi, Lala Rukh and Rummana Hussain. It is a history of decolonial, feminist artists that bridges the Indian subcontinent, the Indian Ocean, Europe and the United States during the second half of the twentieth century.

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