Professor Omar Kholeif leads the curatorial practices subject area at The Glasgow School of Art, where they are Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice and Programme Leader of the MLitt in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art), delivered jointly with the University of Glasgow — the first postgraduate curating programme of its kind in Scotland.

Their research is animated by the concept of dreamwork: the labour of safeguarding material and aesthetic culture, which they argue is the necessary vocation of historians, curators, and academics today. This commitment emerged from a sustained inquiry into "difference" — the embodied experience of erasure, and the generative force of seeming "error" at the margins of history. Drawing on cultural studies, anthropology, and the crosscurrents of visual culture, Kholeif examines how pictures exert their own agency over society, and how cultural tools generate new epistemic structures. Their work traces the diasporic imagination across two decades of writing, exhibition-making, and the (re)imagining of public collections and archives.

Working as a historian, author, artist, curator, and museum director, Professor Kholeif has constituted multivalent acts of world-building through books, biennials, broadcast, and museum exhibitions — collaborating with artists and architects, historians and authors, technologists and entrepreneurs. They have held senior positions including Director of Collections and Senior Curator at the Sharjah Art Foundation; Manilow Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London — alongside earlier roles at Cornerhouse/HOME, Manchester; FACT, Liverpool; and SPACE, London, where they served as Director of Art, Residencies and Technology. They were Founding Artistic Director of the SAFAR Film Festival at the Arab British Centre, London, and Research Professor at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art Research Unit, Teesside University. They have taught at the University of Chicago; Hunter College, City University of New York; Northwestern University; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

The author and editor of over forty books in multiple languages, Kholeif's recent publications include Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs (Phaidon, 2023) and the imagine/otherwise series (Sternberg Press/The MIT Press), a signature editorial project devoted to artists whose lives and works ask us to imagine the world otherwise — including volumes on Sonia Balassanian, Lalitha Lajmi, and Huguette Caland. They have written extensively on modern and contemporary artists including Etel Adnan, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Yto Barrada, Judith Barry, Zarina Bhimji, Carlos Bunga, Huguette Caland, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Simone Fattal, Lubaina Himid CBE RA, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emily Jacir, Derek Jarman, Marwan, Otobong Nkanga, Trevor Paglen, Michael Rakowitz, Hrair Sarkissian, Hassan Sharif, Wael Shawky, Magda Stawarska, Nil Yalter, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Akram Zaatari, among many others.

Kholeif holds a PhD from the University of Reading, an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, a PGCert from Screen Academy Scotland, and an MA from the University of Glasgow, their alma mater.

As a scholar and educator, they warmly welcome prospective research and postgraduate students who are eager to engage with their own culturally situated contexts. Informal enquiries are encouraged by email in advance of any formal application.