Senate Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Nash has taught widely: in the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at

Birkbeck College, University of London; as a visiting lecturer at the Whitney Museum

Independent Study Program in New York; and at NYU as Adjunct Professor in the

Department of Cinema Studies. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Nanyang

Technological University of Singapore’s Centre for Contemporary Art and has taught at

Harvard both as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental

Media and as a Visiting Scholar in Afro American Studies. He was Head of Department

for Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London where he

developed the Inspire Program, a positive action MA pathway for curators from minority

backgrounds for which he raised £3MGBP from public funds.

As a curator, Mark Nash has frequently collaborated with Isaac Julien on numerous film

and art projects. He also collaborated regularly with the late Okwui Enwezor, including

on Documenta11 and on The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements

in Africa, 1945–1994, both in 2002, and most recently on ‘The Arena’ project at the

Venice Biennial 2015 which featured an epic live reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Research Interests

More recently, he curated moving image exhibitions Viva L’Italia at the Museo Civico

Archeologico (2017) and The Coming Community (2018) both for Artefiera Bologna

which focused on the legacy of 1970s socialist culture in Bologna. In 2016, he worked

on a major international exhibition Yingxiang/The Shadow Never Lies with Joshua Jiang

(curator of the 4th Guangzhou Triennial, 2012) focusing on contemporary moving image

and photographic work for M21: 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai. In

addition to the publication of The Shadow Never Lies (the exhibition’s accompanying

catalogue), 2016 marked the publication of an edited work with a critical introduction by

Nash; it is entitled Red Africa: Affective Communities in the Cold War, London: Black

Dog Publishing.

Biography, Education and Training

Mark Nash is a distinguished independent curator, film historian and filmmaker with a

specialization in contemporary fine art moving image practices, avant-garde and world

cinema. He holds a PhD from Middlesex University and an MA from Cambridge

University.

He is currently a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he founded

the Isaac Julien Lab with his partner and long-time collaborator, Isaac Julien.

His most recent publication, Curating the Moving Image (Normal Films, London, 2023) outlines several key concepts that range from exhibition architecture and curating as an affective and artistic practice to post-cold war aesthetics and contemporary Chinese art