Nabila Abdel Nabi
Nabila Abdel Nabi is Curator, International Art at Tate Modern where she has worked on exhibitions including The Making of Rodin, and Hilma af Klint & Piet Mondrian: Forms of Life (forthcoming) as well as various displays. She is part of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. She previously worked as Associate Curator at The Power Plant, Toronto, and prior to this as Gallery Manager (Exhibitions), The Third Line, Dubai. Nabila has worked on solo exhibitions and facilitated new commissions by artists including Hajra Waheed, Abbas Akhavan, Kapwani Kiwanga, Kader Attia, Omar Ba and Amalia Pica, among others. Abdel Nabi holds degrees from the Courtauld Institute of Art and University of Chicago.
Leeza Ahmady
Leeza Ahmady is currently the Director of programs at the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts. She is an internationally recognized curator of exhibitions, festivals, and experimental educational forums. She has also led Asia Contemporary Art Week, the premier US platform for artistic dialogues from all regions of Asia since 2005. After studying political science, art history, and philosophy at St. John’s University, Ahmady began her career showcasing artists immersed in site-specific installation, sound, performance, and new media works at popular New York nightclubs for compelling Organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational and the Research Center for Material Culture unexpected encounters between art and the public. Next, her groundbreaking research on post-Soviet Central Asia and the region’s reorientation to pre-Communist nomadic and Islamic identities earned her an MA from Pratt Institute, with presentations at critical international venues and exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Asia Art Archive Hong Kong, and dOCUMENTA (13) Kassel, Germany and Kabul, Afghanistan. Ahmady’s highly distinguished collaborative approach to empowering the arts as a vital source for creating consciousness in society has enabled over 3000 diverse practitioners to present their perspectives at notable local and international institutions, art fairs, and auction houses, including Asia Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, ICI-Independent Curators International, Queens Museum, Sotheby’s, Performa, Alserkal Avenue and many more. She has also contributed writings to prominent publications, such as Flash Art, Ocula, and Manifesta Journal.
Dina Akhmadeeva
Dina Akhmadeeva is Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern where she works across exhibitions, displays and acquisitions into the collection. Her current projects include the recently opened exhibitions Maria Bartuszova and Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Rope and Thread, alongside the forthcoming 2023 Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Her independent projects include Baltic Triennial 13 (Vilnius, Tallinn, Riga, 2018), the exhibition Avoidance at Futura, Prague (2021), and the programme In the mouths of others within the exhibition EURASIA: a Landscape of Mutability at M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2021–22), a research project which connects to her ongoing work on the artistic mobilisation of the somatic, the communal and the ancestral through sonic practices. She holds a BA and Master’s in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of Oxford, where she was awarded the Arts and Humanities Research Council Master’s Scholarship and the Association for Art History Postgraduate Dissertation Prize.
Mollie Arbuthnot
Mollie Arbuthnot is an historian specialising in the visual and material cultures of the Soviet Union. She is a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, currently researching Islamic and Central Asian art in Soviet museums. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester and taught at Durham University before joining Cambridge in 2021.
Alex Dika Seggerman
Alex Dika Seggerman is assistant professor of Islamic art history at Rutgers University-Newark. Her scholarship investigates the intersection of Islam and modernism in art history. She is author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and co-editor of Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022.) She received her doctorate in the history of art from Yale University in 2014. Prior to joining the Rutgers-Newark faculty in 2018, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Smith College, Hampshire College, and Yale University. In 2022, she was the Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C. Her next book project will cover the art history of American Islam.
Saodat Ismailova
Saodat Ismailova (1981, Uzbekistan) is based in Tashkent and Paris. She studied film and has made fiction films and documentaries, which have won awards at various international festivals. In 2013, she presented her first video installation, Zukhra, at the Venice Biennale. Since then she has focussed on the intersection of cinema and visual art. Successfully: in 2022 her work was selected for both the Venice Biennale and Documenta.
Sarah Johnson
Sarah Johnson is curator of the Middle East and North Africa collections at Stichting Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen. Her research centres on modern and contemporary art from the Middle East, with a particular focus on Iraq, as well as on early Islamic objects. Previously, she was a curator of Islamic Organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational and the Research Center for Material Culture collections at the British Museum in London, where she worked on the modern and contemporary collections from the Middle East. She also worked as a researcher in the curatorial department at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C., where she helped to organize the permanent galleries of ancient Iran and the travelling exhibition, Roads of Arabia.
Nur Sobers-Khan
Nur Sobers-Khan has curated Islamic art, manuscript and archival collections from the Middle East and South Asia at the British Library London, Aga Khan Documentation Center MIT, Museum of Islamic Art Doha, and the Ministry of Culture KSA. She received her PhD (2012) and BA (2006) from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include devotional practices and visual culture in South Asia and the Ottoman Empire.
Mirjam Shatanawi
Mirjam Shatanawi is a lecturer of Heritage Theory at the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the Arts). She is the author of Islam at the Tropenmuseum (2014) and co-editor of Islam and heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities (Routledge, 2021). Her PhD thesis Making and unmaking Indonesian Islam: legacies of colonialism in museums discusses the silences surrounding Indonesian Islam in Dutch museums. is a lecturer of Heritage Theory at the Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the Arts). She is the author of Islam at the Tropenmuseum (2014) and co-editor of Islam and heritage in Europe: Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities (Routledge, 2021). Her PhD thesis Making and unmaking Indonesian Islam: legacies of colonialism in museums discusses the silences surrounding Indonesian Islam in Dutch museums.
Slavs and Tatars
Slavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at several institutions, including the Vienna Secession; MoMA, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Albertinum Dresden, amongst others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. The collective has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently Лук Бук (Look Book) with Distanz Verlag In addition to launching a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from their region, Slavs and Tatars opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in Berlin-Moabit, as well as an online merchandising store: MERCZbau.
