Dr Elisa Adami

Biography

I am a researcher, writer, editor and translator. My work looks at contemporary art practices from the Global South (particularly the SWANA region), de/anticolonial theory and art/experimental writing. The main strands of my research are: 1) archival work that redresses and repairs historical narratives shaped by colonialism; 2) multilingual writing and translation with an attention to minoritised languages such as dialects, vernaculars and creoles; 3) questions of land rights, agricultural commons and sustainable ecologies rooted in Indigenous cosmologies/epistemologies.

At UAL, I have been Postdoctoral Researcher-in Residence at the Decolonising Arts Institute (2020–21) and Research Fellow at Afterall since 2021. I am Managing Editor of the One Work and Two Works book series and Editor of Afterall Journal. I am also Managing Editor and contributor of the forthcoming monograph Nida Sinnokrot: Palestine is Not A Garden (Sternberg Press/MIT Press). I have recently translated The Overturned Pyramid, a collection of essays by Italian architect Giancarlo De Carlo, forthcoming with MIT Press.

I completed my PhD in 2019 at the Royal College of Art in London. My dissertation focused on radical historiographical practices in the work of Lebanese artists of the postwar generation.