Nadine Monem

Biography

I am an editor, publisher and writer working in experimental forms. Teaching is central to my practice and, together with writing and editing, operates as interconnected forms of cultural work. I am lecturer on BA Culture, Criticism and Curation, and MA Culture, Criticism and Curation, and supervise a small number of PhD students. My pedagogy is shaped by decolonial and feminist approaches and treats the classroom as a site of shared risk. I also co-convene and design symposia, workshops, and experimental learning spaces that bring together artists, writers, students and institutions.

My primary practice is writing working across speculative nonfiction and criticism. My work attempts to put language at risk through an anti-colonial poetics shaped by implication, refusal and diasporic forms of attention. I often work with fragments, partial histories, silences, archival absences and hauntings, searching for fugitive forms of knowledge and collaborators across time. My work has been published internationally in Wasafiri, Errant Journal, Black Warrior Review, The Seventh Wave, Elephant Magazine, and other places. It has been recognised with the Wasafiri Queen Mary University New Writing Prize, the Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Prize, the Room Nonfiction Prize, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and has been selected as a finalist for prizes including The Sewanee Review Nonfiction Prize and the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize.

As an editor and art publisher, I have co-created over fifty books on contemporary art and culture working with both established and emerging arts organisations across the museum and gallery sector, including the Hayward Gallery (where I was Art Publisher), the Arts Council Collection, Hayward Touring, Wellcome Collection, the Archive of Modern Conflict, the National Gallery, BBC and others. I have worked closely with some of the most well-known artists practicing today, including Grayson Perry, Sonia Boyce, Jeremy Deller, Assemble, Tracey Emin, William Kentridge, David Shrigley, Pipilotti Rist and Katrina Palmer, and commissioned work from an equally inspiring list of writers including Brian Dillon, Rosalind Krauss, Ali Smith, Miranda July, Stevie Wonder, Marina Warner, Rachel Cusk and the late Stuart Hall. Publishing is a practice of sociality, a way of thinking with others, while attending to the institutional conditions that shape what can be said and how knowledge circulates.