Omar Kholeif
Omar Kholeif
- Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice
- ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0126-318X- Job Title
- Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice
- School or Academic Area
- School of Fine Art
- School or Academic Area Supervised for
- School of Design, School of Fine Art, Interdisciplinary Research
- Professional Address
- Professor Omar Kholeif, PhD Programme Leader, Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Art, School of Fine Art, The Glasgow School of Art GSA STOW Building 43 Shamrock Street, Glasgow, G4 9LD Scotland, United Kingdom
Biography
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,
Research Interests
Research Interests
Dreamwork; the diasporic imagination; postcolonial, anti-colonial, and contra-colonial histories, movements, and aesthetics; global exhibition histories; curatorial studies and museology; authorship and publishing in the expanded field of curating; works on paper
Research Funding
o Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts [Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age], [Primary Investigator-Author, [2016]
o Creative Capital| Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts [Toward a Dictum for Arab Art and its Aesthetics] [Primary Investigator] [2017-18]
o Thoma Foundation for the Arts [I Was Raised on the Internet / Art in the Age of Anxiety] [Primary Investigator - Curator] [2018-2020]
o Sotheby’s Prize [The Diasporic Imagination and the Afro-Asian Tongue] [Primary Investigator] [2018-2020]
PGR Supervision Interests
Professor Kholeif welcomes doctoral proposals across four broad strands of inquiry, and is especially drawn to projects that emerge from a candidate's own culturally situated context:
The Diasporic Imagination and Material
Current PGR Students
Francesca Zappia, Circular Ecologies: Copies as Remediative Devices.
Former PGR Students
Recent Examinations:
-Linn Phyllis Seeger, The [Un} Event, Royal College of Art, 2026
Supervised:
-J. Clayton, Rupture in the Museum: Where Race Relations Meet, 2012
-A. Karwacki., The Wrong Side of History: Art Centres and their Political Role within the Four Nations, 2014
-R. Stevenson, Painting as Post-Digital Materiality, 2016
Teaching
Current: Programme Leader — MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art), a joint programme with the University of Glasgow.
Previous programmes, electives, and modules (select): Advanced MA in Curating, Teesside University; Contemporary "Arab" Representations, University of Chicago; Expanding the Field of Exhibitions and their Making, Hunter College, City University of New York; Introduction to Global Art Theory and Practice, London Metropolitan University; Introduction to Drawing, University of Oxford; The Politics of the Curatorial, Sotheby's Institute of Art, London; Advanced Studio, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Introduction to Studio, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
Latest Additions
- Kholeif, Omar (2026) Emotional Materialism: A Quadtriptych by Omar Kholeif. Portable Gray (Gray Center for Critical Inquiry), 9 (1). pp. 126-163. ISSN 2637-8361
- Kholeif, Omar (2026) Accumulating Vocabularies: Parsing Through Otobong Nkanga’s Aesthetic Language. NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 58. pp. 72-93. ISSN Print: 1075-7163; Online: 2152-7792
- Kholeif, Omar (2026) Double Fantasy: Learning, Living and Loving with Ibrahim Massouda: A Surrealist Egyptian Story? In: The Color and Lyricism of Alberto Massuda. Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Brazil, pp. 140-149.
- Kholeif, Omar (2025) Huguette Caland: imagine/otherwise. imagine/otherwise, 5 . Sternberg Press, London and MIT Press, MA, London, UK and Cambridge, MA.
- Kholeif, Omar (2025) RO U T I N G H O M E W I T H C A R L O S B U N G A. In: Carlos Bunga: Inhabit the Contradiction. Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, Lenz Press, Milan and Distributed Art Publishers, New York, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 102-123. ISBN 9791280579928
- Kholeif, Omar (2025) Finding My Blue Sky: The Search for Feeling in Art, Again. Lisson Grove, Lisson Gallery, Bell Street Galleries, 29th of May - 26th July 2025
- Kholeif, Omar (2025) Light on Things / Ghosts Sheltering Beneath a Cloud of Entropy. Central Museum/Hartwig Art Foundation/Lanhuis Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands, 12 April - 26 October 2025
- Kholeif, Omar (2025) Would it be okay if we told a story? Hoda Tawakol and Me. In: Hoda Tawakol: Some Ties Linger On. Kerber Verlag. ISBN 9783735610072
- Kholeif, Omar (2025) Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska: Nets for Night and Day. MUDAM - The Modern Art Museum of Luxembourg, 7 March - 24 August 2025
- Kholeif, Omar and Arundhati-Thomas, Skye (2025) The Mirror Has Two Faces. In: Lalitha Lajmi: imagine/otherwise. imagine/otherwise, 3 . The MIT Press and Sternberg Press, Cambridge MA and London, UK, pp. 1-96. ISBN 9781915609342
