Denise-Marie Teece

Assistant Professor of Art History Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: MA, PhD New York University, Institute of Fine Arts

Research Areas: art and architecture in the Islamic world


Denise-Marie Teece is an art historian specializing in the art and architecture of the Islamic world. Assistant Professor of Art History at New York University in Abu Dhabi since 2014, she also taught coursework at New York University in New York City. Prior to joining NYUAD, she worked for nine years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the Department of Islamic Art. She also held positions at The Brooklyn Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles, and served as a curatorial consultant to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. She is a graduate of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Her research interests include transregional artistic exchange, the history of collection and display, technical art history, carpets and textiles of the Islamic world, and Persian manuscript production – with an emphasis on the Qara Qoyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu period. Her research has been published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Harvard/MIT/Brill journal Muqarnas, the Brill ‘Intersections’ series, the George Washington University/The Textile Museum Journal, and The British Library,  among others.

Her current projects include a study of the Gulf and Indian Ocean World exchange networks, based on her Master’s thesis completed at the IFA/NYU. Focused on the movement of Chinese porcelains, this study will form part of a larger monograph in progress. Working together with the students of her ‘Silk Roads, Sea Routes, and Shared Heritage’ course, she is developing an open-access resource website / online exhibition space on this same theme at: almusafir.org.

Her current course offerings at NYUAD include: ‘Collecting,’ ‘Silk Roads, Sea Routes, and Shared Heritage,’ ‘Gulf and Indian Ocean World Art and Architecture,’ and ‘Art and Architecture of the Islamic World.’ At NYU in New York City, she taught ‘Arts of the Book in the Islamic World.’

Courses Taught