Bani Abidi is a Pakistani visual artist living between Berlin and Karachi. Encompassing video, photography, and performance, Abidi's practice draws on everyday as well as historical events to explore issues of nationalism and state power. She has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Gropius Bau, Berlin, among others, and group shows at the 8th Berlin Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and documenta 13, Kassel.
Alexander Alberro teaches modern and contemporary art history at Barnard College and Columbia University. He is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2003) and Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art (2017).
Jennifer Bajorek teaches literature, art, and visual culture at Hampshire College. She is the author of Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (2020). Her current research is on visual and discursive representations of im/migration in contemporary France. Since 2013, she has been a research associate at the University of Johannesburg, and she is a visiting researcher in the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Politique, through the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, at EHESS, Paris.
Joshua I. Cohen teaches art history at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. His first book, The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (2020), received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. His current book project, tentatively titled Art of the Opaque: African Modernism, Decolonization, and the Cold War, is a critical study of modernism between Africa and its diaspora in the international contexts of decolonization and the global Cold War.
Tammer S. El-Sheikh is a writer, critic, and professor of art history at York University in Toronto. His major publications include Entangled Bodies: Art, Identity and Intercorporeality (2020), “Draw Me a Sheep! Contemporary Responses to the Histories of Art Education, Surrealism and Psychoanalysis in Egypt” (2017), and “Six Characters and an Anthropologist: Form and Information in Three Works by Hassan Khan” (2013). His reviews, art criticism, and essays have appeared in Arab Studies Journal, Canadian Art, Parachute, Border Crossings, and Black Flash, as well as online at Momus.ca and Akimbo.ca and in the catalogs of exhibitions both in Canada and abroad.
Vishal Khandelwal is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His current book manuscript analyzes design and art pedagogy and practice at the National Institute of Design in India, through the work of key individuals who, between 1955 and 1985, taught visual communication, textile design, architecture, and product design at this experimental design school and at other academies in Ahmedabad and beyond. Khandelwal's research and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His article “Nelly Sethna and the Reception of Textiles between the United States and India” (2021) was published in The Journal of Modern Craft.
Sonal Khullar teaches in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 (2015) and the editor of Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia (2023).
Ijlal Muzaffar teaches in the Department of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has written extensively on the intersection of modern architecture and Third World development discourses. His current research looks at how modern architectural framings of local materials, self-help, and climatically responsive buildings helped bypass the central dilemma of mid-20th century decolonial world order: how to make plausible the idea of spontaneous Third World development without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule.
Foad Torshizi teaches in the Department of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. His areas of research are global contemporary art, contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern art, postcolonial theory, the ethics of readership, and the politics of translation and interpretation. His writing has appeared in books and academic journals in both the United States and Iran, including Grey Room; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Iranian Studies; and Herfeh: Honarmand.
Vazira Zamindar teaches in the Department of History at Brown University. She is the author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (2007) and a coeditor of Love, War and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan (2020) and How Secular Is Art? On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia (2023). She founded the discussion forum Art History from the South (2018-20) and collaborates with the Decolonial Initiative on Migration of Objects and People at Brown University.