Mark Nash
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.
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. 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.
