Research Interests
- Social histories of art
- Transnational and diasporic modernisms
- Global contemporary art
- Abstraction and text
- Amazigh art and the art of the Sahara
- Decolonial feminisms
- African anticolonial thought and praxis
- Indigenous sovereignty movements
Education
BA, Fine Art, University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK
MA, Contemporary Curating, University of Sunderland, UK
Bio
Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz is an artist, curator, poet, and PhD candidate in Art History with a specialization in modern and contemporary art from the north of Africa. Their doctoral dissertation, titled Indigenous Presentness: Translocal Politics of Amazigh Signs and Symbols, explores the nexus between Amazigh artistic production and sovereignty movements across the Indigenous territories known as Tamazgha, connecting recent revival movements to larger discourses on indigeneity and Africanity. Indigenous Presentness theorizes the innovative artistic forms that emerged in the region after the 1960s, particularly sign- and script-based abstraction, a form deeply rooted in ancient practices like tattooing, as a mode of decolonizing praxis.
Khaymaz is the 2023 recipient of the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, awarded by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) for their paper titled “To Twist a Historical Knot: Projects of Pan-Arabism, Hurufiyya, and Amazighism.” In 2022, they were awarded the Mark Tessler Graduate Student Prize Award by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) for the paper titled “Phantom Images, Residual Violences: An Unlooking and Untelling of Marc Garanger’s Femmes algériennes 1960.”
Their doctoral research has been supported by a number of UK and US organizations, including Tate Modern, Delfina Foundation, Brooks Foundation, Center for Curatorial Leadership/Mellon Foundation, and Museum of Fine Arts Houston, as well as earning several University of Texas distinctions, such as the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Program scholarship, Provost’s Fellowship, and the Department of Art History Graduate Excellence Award. Their writing appears in the Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Settler Colonial Studies, and various exhibition catalogs, among others.