Board Members and Officers
Nada Shabout, President and Founding Board Member
Nada Shabout is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas. Her teaching interests are in the area of Arab and Islamic visual culture, theory and history, imperialism, Orientalism and globalization. She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (University of Florida Press, 2007) as well as numerous articles on modern and contemporary Iraqi art as well as examining legal and ethical responsibilities of the US in Iraq after 2003.
http://www.art.unt.edu/
shabout@unt.edu
Sarah Rogers, President-Elect and Founding Board Member
Sarah Rogers received her Ph.D. from the History, Theory, and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of technology, where she wrote her dissertation, "Postwar Art and the Historical Roots of Beirut's Cosmopolitanism." She has held fellowships with Southern Methodist University, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and the Palestinian American Research Center and published in Parachute, Pensée de Midi, Arab Studies Journal, and Art Journal.
sarrog@yahoo.com
Dina Ramadan, Secretary and Founding Board Member
Dina A Ramadan is Assistant Professor of Arabic at Bard College. Her research is concerned with the development of the category of modern art and the relationship between education and artistic production in early 20th century Egypt. She is a senior editor of Arab Studies Journal and the guest editor of the Spring 2010 themed issued on the visual arts. She been published in Art Journal, Arab Studies Journal and the MESA Bulletin.
Rhonda Saad, Treasurer
Rhonda Saad is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, where she is working on her dissertation entitled, “Impossible Exhibitions: Palestinian Art and the Public Parameters of a Transnational Imaginary, 1923-1982.” She received a master's degree from Tufts University, where she focused on contemporary Palestinian art, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia.
Salwa Mikdadi, Founding Board Member
Salwa Mikdadi is an independent curator and art historian whose work spans over twenty-five years in the field of Arab art and museums. Her publications and exhibitions focus on gender and politics in art, art by Arab Americans, Palestinian artists, museums and visitors, art interpretation, and Arab art institutions and support systems in art production. She is currently the Executive Director of the Arts and Culture Program at the Emirates Foundation in Abu Dhabi.
curator.muse@yahoo.com
Silvia Naef, Founding Board Member
Silvia Naef is a professor at the University of Geneva in the Arabic Studies Unit. From 2007–2009 she is a visiting professor at the University of Toronto where she is teaching modern visual arts of the Middle East. Naef has previously taught at the universities of Basel (Switzerland) and Tübingen (Germany).
http://www.unige.ch/
silvia.naef@unige.ch
Beral Medra, Founding Board Member
Beral Madra is a curator, art critic, and director of the BM Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul. She has been the curator of the 1st and 2nd Istanbul Biennale (1987-89) and until 2005 served as the curator of the Turkish Pavilions at the Venice Biennials. She has also taught Curatorial Management in the Faculty of Art and Design of Yildiz Technical University (2000-2004). In addition to Turkish contemporary art, Madra’s interests include the inter-regional artistic collaboration between South Caucasus, Middle East and Central Asia.
http://www.btmadra.com/
Shiva Balaghi, Founding Board Member
Shiva Balaghi is a consultant on international education at New York University. Her research and teaching focuses on gender studies and cultural studies of the modern Middle East. Her publications include Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution (co-edited, 2002), Saddam Hussein: A Biography (2005), and Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East (co-edited, 1994). She helped organize the 2002 exhibit, Between Word and Image, at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. She has written numerous articles on contemporary Iranian visual culture and is currently completing a book on Iranian cultural history from the Qajar era to the present.
Nasser Rabbat, Honorary Board Advisor
Nasser Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His scholarly interests include the history and historiography of Islamic art and architecture, urban history, and post-colonial criticism. Beside publishing articles in specialized scholarly journals and edited collections, professor Rabbat regularly contributes to a number of Arabic newspapers and journals, such as al-Hayat, al-Adab, and Wughat Nazar on art, architectural, and critical and cultural issues.