Susan Marie Ossman
Associate Dean for Graduate Studies; Visiting Professor of Movements and Places, Movement and Cultural Practices
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: AB UC Berkeley, DEA U Paris VII, MA UC Berkeley, PhD UC Berkeley
Research Websites: Scattered Subjects
Research Areas: Mobility, subjectivity; globalization; gender; art and scholarship
Susan Ossman trained as an anthropologist, artist, and historian who has researched and worked in North Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. She is known for her creative research design and pioneering associations of art and scholarship, which have led her to propose critical new perspectives on media, mobility, aesthetics, globalization, gender, environment, and politics. She has led numerous international collective programs, notably The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop (MMTW), a collective of migrant artists and scholars that explores questions of migration with diverse publics in sites that range from public plazas to museums like the Hermitage-Amsterdam and tourist sites like the Berlin Wall Memorial. Ossman writes about her path as an artist-scholar in her latest book, Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork, a Memoir of Anthropology and Art (Routeldge 2021). Her previous books include Picturing Casablanca, Portraits of Power in a Modern City (California 1994), Three Faces of Beauty, Casablanca, Paris, Cairo ( Duke 2002), and Moving Matters, Paths of Serial Migration (Stanford 2013). She has exhibited and performed her work in galleries, museums, and public spaces in the US, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Ossman’s “Scattered Subjects” project created a digital/ onsite laboratory to experiment subjectivity and limit-experiences in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns. This year she published an article in Visual Ethnography about her pandemic experiments, which are also the subject of an upcoming essay by Deborah Kapchan for TDR Review. She continues to pursue new work on states of emergency, such as States of Exception, a solo exhibition curated by Mika Cho at the Silverman Gallery at California State University Los Angeles in 2025.
Current projects also include “Gather Wood, Gather Words,” a collaborative program that probes the human condition in our time of climate change. In 2024 Research led to an exhibition/performance/research program at the American Legation Museum in Tangiers, and a staged reading of Planet First, a play William R Duell developed through research with Ossman on logging and paper mills in the Shenandoah Valley. 2025 will see a collaborative exhibition at the Rizq Art Initiative Gallery in Abu Dhabi by the members of the NYUAD group working on this theme in diverse sites around the globe.