Nada Shabout
Visiting Professor of Art History
Affiliation: Visiting
Education: PhD University of Texas at Arlington
Research Areas: Modern Arab Art; Modern and Contemporary Art from West Asia and North Africa; Global Modernism; Orientalism and Postcolonial Studies; Historiography; Iraqi Art and Culture
Nada Shabout holds a PhD in the Humanities, Art History and Criticism from the University of Texas at Arlington, specializing in modern and contemporary Arab Art. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) and founding director of Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA). Shabout has published widely on modern and contemporary Arab and Iraqi art. She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics, University of Florida Press, 2007; co-editor with Salwa Mikdadi of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century, Thames & Hudson, 2009; and co-editor with Anneka Lenssen and Sarah Rogers of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. Notable among exhibitions she has curated: A Banquette for Seaweed: Snapshots from the Arab 1980s, 2022-2023; Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, 2010; traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, 2005-2009; and co-curator, Modernism and Iraq, 2009. Major awards of her research include Writers Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation 2018; The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) fellow 2006, 2007, Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, 2008. Leading an AMCA team (Sarah Rogers, Pamela Karimi, Jessica Gerschultz, Anneka Lenssen, Sarah-Neel Smith, Dina Ramadan, and Tiffany Floyd), she received a Getty Foundation Grant in 2019, as part of its Connecting Art Histories initiative, to support the project, “Mapping Art Histories from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey” that undertook extensive research on courses, programs, and alternative educational platforms and initiatives in the fields of art history, architectural studies, and archaeology throughout the region. She received the Presidential Excellency Award, UNT 2018 and the 2020 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Literature from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences. Shabout was the Project Advisor for the Saudi National Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2019, and on the Founding Board of Directors, Visual Art Commission, Ministry of Culture, Saudi Arabia (2020-2023 and 2024-2027); she serves on the Board of The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII); and the College Art Association (caa) Board of Directors (2020-2024). She is currently working on a new book project, Demarcating Modernism in Iraqi Art: The Dialectics of the Decorative, 1951-1979, under contract with the American University in Cairo Press.