Kirsten Scheid is professor of Anthropology and Art Studies at the American University of Beirut and author of Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950 (Indiana U Press, 2022).
Having conducted three decades of fieldwork and archival research in the Middle East and North Africa, primarily Lebanon and Palestine, Scheid focuses on the aesthetics and institutions of modernity and the contemporary practices by which artists and their audiences reshape their colonised, liberated, and post-colonial societies. Exhibitions form a crucial element in her collective-looking practice, crystallising in Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920-1960 (Columbia University, New York, 2023), and Jerusalem Actual and Possible (9th edition of the Jerusalem Show, Al-Ma`mal Contemporary Art Foundation, Jerusalem, 2018).
