Fiona Kidd
Associate Professor of History and Art and Art History; Global Network Associate Professor in the Study of the Ancient World
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA (Hons) University of Melbourne; PhD University of Sydney
Research Areas: identity, images and the built environment, craft production, pre-Islamic Central Asian visual art
Fiona Kidd is an Assistant Professor of History and Art and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi. She teaches in the history, art and art history, and ancient world programs, with a special focus on Central Asia. She has been involved in archaeological, museum-based, and archival research in Central Asia for almost 20 years. After gaining her PhD in 2005 at the University of Sydney, she concentrated on fieldwork in the historical region of Khorezm in north-western Uzbekistan, and in particular on an unrivalled first century CE corpus of mural paintings – the earliest such corpus in Central Asia. Following shorter projects in Afghanistan (2008) and Kazakhstan (2010), and as an Assistant Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012-2014), in 2015 she began a new collaborative field project in the Bukhara oasis of Sogdiana (Uzbekistan), Borderlands and rural landscapes in Central Asian antiquity, which she co-directs with colleagues from the United States and Uzbekistan. Under the umbrellas of archaeology and art history, agro-pastoral relations, identity, and craft production have been consistent themes across these interdisciplinary projects.
Kidd’s research has been supported by the Australian Research Council, New York University and New York University Abu Dhabi. Her doctoral research was supported by funding from an Australian Postgraduate Award, grants-in-aid from the University of Sydney Near Eastern Archaeology fund (2000, 2001) and from the James Kentley Memorial Fund (2002) as well as funding from the University of Sydney Central Asia Program.