What is Research Now? Day 2

Sussan Babaie is Professor of Islamic and Iranian Art History at the Courtauld, University of London. She has curated exhibitions on Persian and Islamic arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at Harvard, Smith College and Michigan University museums, and at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. She is the author of the award-winning Isfahan and Its Palaces and co-author of Persian Kingship and Architecture; Shirin Neshat, Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art; and Geometry and Art: In the Modern Middle East. Sussan is currently working on a co-curated exhibition about arts of the Great Mongol State for The Royal Academy, London, and on a book about Persian art and food.

Sria Chatterjee is Head of Research Initiatives at the Paul Mellon Centre. Sria’s research interests lie at the intersection of art, science and environment and she publishes extensively on these topics. Sria leads the multi-year Climate & Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre. In 2020, she founded and led the award-winning digital project, Visualizing the Virus.

Before coming to the Paul Mellon Centre, Sria was a fellow at the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and an advanced researcher at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland, where she held a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship. She served as a contributing editor for British Art Studies from 2020–22 and remains involved in the journal as Editorial Advisor. In 2024, Sria is on research leave from the Paul Mellon Centre on a fellowship at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. In 2023, Sria served as a judge for the Pen Hessell-Tiltman Prize for historical non-fiction. Sria received her PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University in 2019.

Cooking Sections investigates the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism. Using site-responsive installations, performances, and video, their practice confronts the overlapping boundaries of art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics. Founded in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections deploys food as both a lens and a tool to expose landscapes of exploitation, ecological breakdown, and the metabolic inequalities underpinning global food systems. They are Readers in Architecture and Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art, London, where they lead CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA. They are Fellows at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Lee Douglas is an anthropologist, curator and filmmaker. She is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she directs the Centre for Visual Anthropology. Combining ethnographic research and multimodal media production, she unpacks how the past is reconstructed and the future reimagined through collective engagements with the traces of political violence, displacement and decolonisation in Spain, Portugal and the Iberian Atlantic. At present, she is using film, sound and archival research to trace histories of extraction, forest ecologies and plant memories via the history of eucalyptus and its proliferation in Spain and Portugal.  

She is the Director of What Remains (2017, DER) and The Revolution (Is) Probable (2022) and the co-editor of the book series SPECTROPIA: Experiments in Trace (De Gruyter). She is active in experimental editorial and public-facing curatorial projects, including the Writing with Light Collective, the TRACTS network and other initiatives that celebrate critical, creative and inventive approaches to multimodal practice. 

Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s practice moves between video installation, film and writing. She is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond cognitive power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. Her work interrogates the “real” as it is shaped through contesting conciousnesses, their narratives and the form these took across the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. Her work is an enactment of articulating from elision and between historically subjugated subjectivities, privileging South-South relations in respect of imagination and knowledge yet unmediated by the Global North.  

In 2017 she was laureate of the Iwalewahaus art award and was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar 2018. In 2019 Kitso-Lynn won the NIHSS award for best visual arts. She was a postdoctoral fellow and artist in residence with the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape and artist in residence with the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2019. She was with the CHR until 2022 when she took up a senior lectureship with the University of the Witwatersrand and was recipient of the biannual Henrike Grohs Art Award in 2024. She will be taking up an artist residency with The International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York in summer of 2025. 

Sahar Qawasmi is an architect, restorer, cultural organizer, and forager, committed to the conservation of land, restoration of architectural heritage, and preservation of Palestine's cultural histories as testaments of creative collective resilience. Sahar cofounded Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture with Nida Sinnokrot; a progressive academy located on a hillside of deep architectural and natural histories in Ein Qiniya, Ramallah, Palestine, where artists, farmers, activists, community members, and students rethink political and social agency and the space of the commons. There, through collective unlearning/learning and experimentation, they explore architectural and cultural practices outside of capitalist, national, and institutional structures to reimagine collective liberation. 

Tiara Roxanne is a Purhépecha Mestiza scholar and artist whose work is dedicated to rethinking the ethics of AI through an anti-colonial cyberfeminist lens. They are currently writing their forthcoming book on digital attunement and the technological haunt with University of California Press. (title pending). In 2024, Tiara completed their Postdoctoral Fellowship at Data & Society in Trustworthy Infrastructures where they explored Indigenous and Pre-colonial methodologies and practices on and offline. They were also a Salzburg Global Fellow in the Creating Futures: Art and AI for Tomorrow’s Narratives cohort. As a performance artist and practitioner, they work between the digital and the material using textiles from the space of the body as a site of refusal, dehiscence, decolonisation and ceremony. They have presented at Ars Electronica, University of Michigan, Images Festival, Leuphana University, European Media Art Festival, University of Applied Arts Vienna, SOAS London, Duke University and University College London among others. 

Avinòam Shalem is the Riggio Professor of the History of the Arts of Islam at the Columbia University in New York. He served as Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2020 to 2021. His main fields of interest concern the global context of the visual cultures of the world of Islam in the Mediterranean, medieval aesthetic thoughts on visual arts and craftsmanship, and the making of the image of “Islamic” art as well as the modern historiography of the field. He has published extensively on varied topics concerning intercultural exchanges within and between the world of Islam and Europe. His current book project, “When Nature Becomes Ideology”, critically explores the varied approaches of “scaping” and curating the rural landscape of Palestine after 1947. Presently, he directs the project Black Mediterranean/Mediterraneo Nero – artistic encounters and counter-narratives/Incontri artistici e contronarrazioni, as part of the Getty Foundation's Connecting Art Histories initiative together with Alina Payne, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. 

Nida Sinnokrot is an artist and associate professor in the program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work critically interrogates the embedded power structures within dominant narrative frameworks and articulations of time and space. Working across film, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and agriculture, he employs mechanical systems and artisanal techniques to expose and subvert technologies of control. His practice challenges modernist paradigms, from cinematic perception to industrial agriculture, revealing the violence of monoculture and the dissonance between productivity and ecological harmony. A recipient of the Open Society Foundations’ Soros Arts Fellowship, Sinnokrot is the co-founder of Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture, an alternative pedagogical platform integrating indigenous ecological knowledge with contemporary art, fostering decolonial approaches to sustainability and cultural memory. His work is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide. 

Sarah Turner is an art historian, curator and writer. She is Director at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Her aim is to share the work and resources of the Paul Mellon Centre as widely as possible and to open up new conversations, ideas and narratives about the histories of British art. Sarah’s full biography including publications, exhibitions and projects can be found here.