Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, photography, drawings, and essays to research forms of utopia-dystopia within families, borders, architecture, and uprisings– beginning from South Asia and then radiating outward to transnational collisions in the Islamicate world after 1945. The hope for a future international humanism, as a radical alternative to current silos of nation, race, and religion, is always the unspoken hope within his work. Historian Vijay Prashad calls Mohaiemen “​​an archaeologist in search of a future” (After All, 2019) and art critic Murtaza Vali considers Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man (1976) as “a hapless history student studying for a Ph.D., an erstwhile stand-in for Mohaiemen” (Modern Painters, 2011) 

Several conversations within contemporary art spaces around “nonalignment” as a concept container pivoted after the premiere of his film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) at Documenta 14, which was a finalist for Britain’s Turner Prize.  Art Review magazine’s list of 100 practitioners impacting contemporary art included him in the 2023 rankings. 

Mohaiemen is co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must Be Defended (2023) and with Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and author of Bengal Photography’s Reality Quest [in Bengali] (2025), Midnight’s Third Child (2023) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (2014). 

Mohaiemen is Associate Professor of Visual Arts, Area Head for Photography, and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Visual Arts Department, School of the Arts, Columbia University. At Columbia, he is also on the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, and Affiliated Faculty with the South Asia Institute and the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society. He received a BA from Oberlin College and a PhD (Anthropology) from Columbia University.