Omar Kholeif

Omar Kholeif is an Egyptian-born, British curator, writer and editor. He currently holds the post of Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and teaches visual art and art history at the University of Chicago. Previously, he was Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Senior Visiting Curator at Cornerhouse and HOME, Manchester and Senior Editor of Ibraaz. He also headed up art and technology at SPACE, London and was Curator at FACT, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool. Kholeif has also been Artistic Director at the Arab British Centre and founding director of the UK's Arab Film Festival. In 2012, he was a co-curator of the Liverpool Biennial. In 2015, he curated the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, as well as the Abraaj Group Art Prize and FOCUS: MENAM at the Armory Show, New York.

Omar writes for the international press and was a founding editor of Portal 9, an Arabic-English journal of urbanism and architecture. His most recent publications include, Vision, Memory and Media (Liverpool University Press, 2010), Far and Wide: Nam June Paik (Leonardo, 2013),You Are Here: Art After the Internet, Virgin with a Memory (for Sophia Al-Maria), Jeddah Childhood circa 1994 (all 2014) and Moving Image (2015). Dr. Kholeif holds degrees from the University of Glasgow, the Royal College of Art, London and the University of Reading. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of AICA, the International Association of Art Critics.