NYU Abu Dhabi's Arts and Humanities division enriched with new senior appointments

• Tarek Al-Ghoussein, an internationally acclaimed artist and Professor of Visual Arts, takes over as Program Director of the region’s first-ever Master of Fine Arts in Art and Media (MFA)
• Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Gregory Pardlo and award-winning global poet and writer Nathalie Handal join as full-time visiting professors in the division’s Literature and Creative Writing program
• Emirati national Shaikha Al Mazrou joins the division as an Assistant Professor of Visual Art

Abu Dhabi, UAE : NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) has appointed two senior academics and the addition of several faculty members to the Arts and Humanities division as the University further strengthens its position as the first comprehensive liberal arts and research campus in the Middle East.

Awam Amkpa, an accomplished and world-renowned theater scholar, filmmaker, and curator of visual and performing arts, has been appointed as the Dean of Arts and Humanities. Amkpa is also a Professor of Drama and Cultural Theory at the departments of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts and Social and Cultural Analysis, Faculty of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Previously at NYU, he served as the Director of Africana Studies, Faculty Senator, as well as Vice Chair of NYU’s Faculty Senators Council and Tenured/Track Faculty Council.

Tarek Al-Ghoussein, an artist and Professor of Visual Arts assumes the role of Program Director of the region’s first-ever Master of Fine Arts (MFA). As a Kuwaiti of Palestinian origin, much of Al-Ghoussein's professional work deals with how his identity is shaped in a context of inaccessibility and loss. Al-Ghoussein's work has been acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Nevada Museum of Art: the British and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; the Sharjah Art Foundations; the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; the Royal Photography Museum in Copenhagen; and the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Barjeel Art Foundation, Abu Dhabi Music & Art Foundation (ADMAF), and Art Jameel.

Provost of NYUAD Arlie Petters said: “Awam Amkpa and Tarek Al-Ghoussein have strong knowledge and experience in the field and have demonstrated deep commitment to the Arts and Humanities and NYU Abu Dhabi. I am convinced that together with our new faculty they will successfully lead and serve the division in its next phase of growth and innovation and help create and sustain an inspiring and excellent liberal arts institution fueled by the intellectual plenitude of a research university.”

Two faculty members have also joined the division’s Literature and Creative Writing program as visiting professors. Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Digest, Gregory Pardlo is the author of Totem, winner of the 2007 American Poetry Review/Honickman Prize, and translator from the Danish of Niels Lyngsø’s, Pencil of Rays, and Spiked Mace. His poems and essays have appeared in leading international publications. Pardlo has received an MFA in poetry from NYU as a New York Times Fellow in Poetry and an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University as a Teaching Fellow along with several fellowships by world renowned academic institutions. Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in the United States and United Kingdom. She has published seven award-winning poetry and flash collections, most recently Life in the Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award. She is the editor The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology; winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, listed as one of the top 10 Feminist Books by The Guardian; and co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, Academy of American Poets bestsellers.

New faculty member and Emirati national Shaikha Al Mazrou also joins the division as Assistant Professor of Visual Art, and will be working together with NYUAD students to help them better understand the human experience through works of art and literature. In 2018, Al Mazrou was awarded the first Artist's Garden commission by the Jameel Arts Centre for her public piece, Green house: Interior yet Exterior, Manmade yet Natural. She was one of five international artists commissioned by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture to produce a public artwork at the Jalila Cultural Centre for Children in Dubai as part of Make Art Possible (2014).

Established in partnership between New York University (NYU) and the emirate of Abu Dhabi, NYUAD has assembled over the past decade a remarkable community of scholars, students, researchers, artists, inventors, and others who have contributed to the growth of the UAE’s capital as a global hub of knowledge and culture, while establishing a new model of higher education for today’s complex world. 

NYU ranks 26th globally in the Times Higher Education World University rankings for 2021, and 11th in the QS Graduate Employability rankings for 2020. The rankings are based on enrolment and programmes throughout all campuses of New York University, including NYU Abu Dhabi.

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About Awam Amkpa

Awam received his BA in Dramatic Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University and his MA in Drama at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and completed his PhD in Drama at the University of Bristol in the UK. Before coming to NYU, Awam Amkpa was Senior Lecturer of Drama and Television at King Alfred’s University College in Winchester, England, and Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, London: Routledge, 2003, and Archetypes, Stereotypes and Polytypes: Theatres of the Black Atlantic. Additionally, he was the director of film documentaries including Winds Against Our Souls, It's All About Downtown, National Images and Transnational Desires, and feature film Wazobia!, as well as the author of art catalogs, several articles in books and journals on modernisms in theater, postcolonial theater, Black Atlantic studies, and film studies. As an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, Awam continues to exhibit globally and present his multifaceted scholarship in venues across the world.

At NYU, he has served as the Director of Africana Studies, Faculty Senator, as well as Vice Chair of NYU’s Faculty Senators Council and Tenured/Track Faculty Council. He has also served on university task forces on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Affordability, and committees on Academic Priorities and Global Learning Outcomes. He has been strongly connected with NYU Abu Dhabi in many different capacities since its inception, most recently serving as the Program Head for Film and New Media and Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities.

About Tarek Al-Ghoussein

Tarek Al-Ghoussein, an artist and Professor of Visual Arts has exhibited extensively in Europe, the United States and The Middle East and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in prominent venues such as MoMA PS1, the 53rd and 55th Venice Biennales; the Singapore Biennale; the 6th and 7th Sharjah Biennales; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea; and Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany and Aperture Gallery, NYC, USA.

Al-Ghoussein's work has been acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Nevada Museum of Art: the British and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; the Sharjah Art Foundations; the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; the Royal Photography Museum in Copenhagen; and the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Barjeel Art Foundation, ADMAF ( Abu Dhabi Music and Art Foundation and Art Jameel.

About Gregory Pardlo

Gregory Pardlo graduated from Rutgers University-Camden and he received an MFA from NYU as a New York Times Fellow in Poetry and an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University as a Teaching Fellow. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and two editions of Best American Poetry, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.

Pardlo is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, MacDowell, the Lotos Club Foundation and Cave Canem. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays published by Knopf in 2018.

About Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal is the author of seven award-winning poetry and flash collections, most recently,  Life in a Country Album, winner of the Palestine Book Award and a Foreword Indies Book Award finalist; the flash collection The Republics, winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing, and the Arab American Book Award; the bestselling bilingual collection La estrella invisible / The Invisible Star; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She has worked on over 20 theatrical productions as a playwright, director, or producer. The author of eight plays, her most recent works have been produced at Washington, DC’s The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey in London.

Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Pen International Croatia Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, and winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, among other honors. Her work has been translated into over 15 languages. She has taught, lectured, and/or given workshops globally, namely at Columbia University, La Sorbonne Paris, Yale-NUS Singapore, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and Universitat Leipzig, Germany, among others. She writes the literary travel column, The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.

About Shaikha Al Mazrou

Shaikha Al Mazrou’s sculptural experimentations and investigations are expressions of materiality—articulations of tension and the interplay between form and content as well as an intuitive, keenly felt understanding of materials and their physical properties. She combines and evolves ideas from contemporary artistic movements similarly preoccupied with formal and material elements, from colour theory to geometric abstraction. Al Mazrou’s work has been shown in a number of exhibitions, including From Barcelona to Abu Dhabi, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2017); The Art of Nature, Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF) (2017); Homage without an Homage, Art Dubai (2017); Is Old Gold?, Dubai Community Theatre & Arts Centre (DUCTAC) (2017); Past Forward: Contemporary Art from the Emirates, Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles (2015); 1st International Arezzo Biennial of Art, Italy (2013); 14th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh (2010); 28th Annual Exhibition of the Emirates Fine Arts Society, Sharjah Art Museum (2010) and Sharjah Cultural Days, Museum of Modern Art, Passau, Germany (2010).

In 2018, Al Mazrou was awarded the first Artist's Garden commission by the Jameel Arts Centre for her public piece Green house: Interior yet Exterior, Manmade yet Natural. She was one of five international artists commissioned by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture to produce a public artwork at the Jalila Cultural Centre for Children in Dubai as part of Make Art Possible (2014). She has also taken part in residency programmes sponsored by the Delfina Foundation, London (in collaboration with Tashkeel, Dubai) and the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority, Bastakiya, Dubai (2011).

Al Mazrou is an artist and an assistant professor of Visual Art at the New York University Abu Dhabi. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Sharjah (2010) and a master’s from Chelsea College of Fine Art, University of the Arts, London (2014).

Al Mazrou was born in 1988 in Sharjah. She currently lives and works in Dubai.

About NYU Abu Dhabi

NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and research campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university. NYU Abu Dhabi has integrated a highly selective undergraduate curriculum across the disciplines with a world center for advanced research and scholarship. The university enables its students in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, and arts to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world and advance cooperation and progress on humanity’s shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi’s high-achieving students have come from over 115 countries and speak over 115 languages. Together, NYU's campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global university, giving faculty and students opportunities to experience varied learning environments and immersion in other cultures at one or more of the numerous study-abroad sites NYU maintains on six continents.

© Press Release 2021