Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz
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00. BiographySheyda Aisha Khaymaz (they/she) is an artist, curator, poet, and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, 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 ancestral practices like tattooing, as a mode of decolonizing praxis.

Khaymaz’s research interests include social histories of art; abstraction and text; transnational and diasporic modernisms; global contemporary art; Amazigh art; art of the Sahara; postcolonial studies; feminist studies; Indigenous methodologies and sovereignty movements; and Black anticolonial thought and praxis. They are 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.

Khaymaz’s most recent curatorial works include The Shape of Words collection exhibition at Tate Modern (2024–2026), Algeria archive display in Hamid Zénati: Two Steps at a Time, curated by Salma Tuqan at Nottingham Contemporary (2024), and Roots and Horizons, programmed for the 3rd Biennial Black Midwest Symposium, in Dayton, Ohio (2024). Khaymaz is a founding member of the curatorial collective and independent press, Lungs Project, which has been operating since 2016 between the UK and the USA, promoting a cross-disciplinary dialogue among early-career artists and writers, and co-editor and publisher of New Landscapes Anthology, a 2019 collection of emerging poetry by QTBIPOC poets.

sheyda.aisha.khaymaz@utexas.edu
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