Susan Marie Ossman
Associate Dean for Graduate Studies; Professor of Movements, Spaces 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 is an anthropologist/artist whose research has focused on media and politics, globalization, migration, and gender. She is known for her innovative research designs, pioneering work across research and the arts across North Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia. From explorations on cultural practices and media in the Maghreb in the 1990’s, to reflexive investigation of serial migration in the 2000s, then mobile art/research with The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop since 2013, and to explorations of gender and ecology through the lens of laundry on the line (On the Line), Ossman has made fieldwork design a leading practice for expansive and impactful transnational transdisciplinary collaborations. Her Scattered Subjects probed questions of subjectivity and possibilities for research collaboration, publication, and exhibition across face-to-face and virtual under pandemic conditions. Current projects include Gather Wood, Gather Words, a rhizomatic network of projects in the UAE, India, Morocco, Brazil, and the USA that probes the human condition in our time of climate change.
Ossman is the author of Picturing Casablanca, Portraits of Power in a Modern City (California 1994), Three Faces of Beauty, Casablanca, Paris, Cairo (Duke 2002), Moving Matters, Paths of Serial Migration (Stanford 2013), and Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork, a Memoir of Anthropology and Art (Routledge 2021). She edited Miroirs Maghrébins, Itinéraires de soi et Paysages de Rencontre (CNRS Editions, 1998), Mimesis (Hermes, CNRS 19898), and The Places We Share: Migration, Subjectivity and Global Mobility (Lexington, 2007). Her art has been exhibited in the USA, Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. Her recent exhibitions include Gather Wood, Gather Words (2024, Tangier American Legation Museum), States of Exception (2025, California State University Los Angeles), and Projects of Art Ethnography (2025, NYU Abu Dhabi Project Space with Lydia Nakashima Degarrod).
Ossman has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and received grants from the US National Endowment of the Arts, British Academy, and CNRS (France), among others. Before joining the faculty of NYUAD in 2022, she taught at the University of California Riverside, Goldmith’s College, University of London, Rice University, Georgetown University, The American University of Paris, and the CELSA-Sorbonne and was a research fellow and center director of the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Rabat, Morocco.