Dale Hudson
Associate Professor of Film and New Media; Global Network Associate Professor of Film and New Media
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA, Bucknell University; MA, New York University; PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Research Areas: art, ecologies, and globalizations; postcolonial and transnational film and digital media; film and visual culture in Middle East [Southwest Asia], North Africa, South Asia (MENASA [SWANASA]), especially the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula
Dale Hudson’s research focuses on art, film, and digital media as sites for understanding the ongoing polycrisis’s cultural, ecological, political, and social dimensions, not evidence of a broken system, but instead as evidence of one that has been functioning as designed across more than five centuries of colonialism, imperialism, globalism, and what follows. His work has been translated into Arabic, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Russian.
His recent work focuses on three interdisciplinary inquiries: (1) how film, visual, and digital media can de-regionalize the Western-defined Middle East (Southwest Asia), North Africa, and South Asia (MENASA [SWANASA]) by focusing on interconnections and interdependencies, especially in the Gulf and on the Arabian Peninsula; (2) how artists and filmmakers contest abuses of power by recontextualizing classification systems and indexical representation in archives in the last century to biometrics and DNA sequencing in databases in this century, and (3) how documentary, experimental, and interactive modes of art and media can locate ecological, local, and indigenous knowledge to contest the enclosure and extraction of resources and knowledge.
His books include Documentary Habitats: Transmedia Ecologies, coauthored with Patricia R. Zimmermann (forthcoming, 2026); Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean Meet, coedited with Alia Yunis (2024); Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods (2017); and Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places, coauthored with Patricia R. Zimmermann (2015).
He also coedited with Alia Yunis a special double issue of Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication titled “Film and Visual Media in the Gulf: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives” (2021). His essays and other writings appear in Afterimage, American Quarterly, Arabian Humanities, Cinema Journal, Jadaliyya, Journal of Palestine Studies, Jump Cut, Media + Environment, Screen, Social Research, Studies in Documentary Film, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, and other journals and books.
With NYUAD colleagues, he curated Elemental Relations, an exhibit of eco-art and ecomedia by students and graduates of NYU Abu Dhabi’s BA and MFA arts programs as part of Personal Structures 2024 at the European Cultural Centre–Italy, alongside the Art Biennale of Venice. He has curated and co-curated annual online exhibitions of digital media for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) since 2007. He has served as a member of the board of directors for the Association of Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) since 2017 and has coordinated Films from the Gulf at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) Film Festival since 2016. He also programs art exhibitions and film series, mostly related to the Gulf, with the NYUAD Art Gallery and NYUAD Institute.