UCLA Arts Announces Faculty Appointments for 2023-24
UCLA Arts welcomes new faculty members, effective July 1, 2023: Samaa Elimam, UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design; Gelare Khoshgozaran, UCLA Department of Art; Romi Ron Morrison, UCLA Department of Design Media Arts; and Ayasha Guerin, UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
(Samaa Elimam / UCLA Arts)
Samaa Elimam
UCLA Arts welcomes a new faculty member to the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design: Assistant Professor Samaa Elimam.
Samaa Elimam’s research examines the intersection of technology, empire, and environment, with a focus on infrastructural landscapes. Her recent work investigates cultures of engineering and land surveying in the Nile Valley under Ottoman rule, particularly in Egypt and Sudan. Previous research and teaching topics have explored rival regimes of technical knowledge, including the history of public utility, optimization, and aesthetics in the design of public works. She is currently working on a book project and exhibition on surveying techniques and the production of the past in the Nile Valley during the nineteenth century.
Elimam’s work has been supported by grants from the Society for the History of Technology, the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among others. She was a visiting studio instructor at the American University in Cairo in 2014-2015 and has practiced architectural design at offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Cairo.
Elimam holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from Harvard University, an M.Arch. with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a B.A. in Architecture with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley.
(Sam Richardson / UCLA Arts)
Gelare Khoshgozaran
UCLA Arts welcomes a new faculty member to the UCLA Department of Art: Assistant Professor Gelare Khoshgozaran.
Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist and filmmaker whose work engages with the legacies of imperial violence manifested in war, militarization, and borders. They use film and video to construct peripheral narratives to redefine existing constructions of “home” as a means of approaching new conceptualizations of belonging.
Khoshgozaran has presented their work internationally, with recent and upcoming exhibitions at Delfina Foundation, Images Festival, EMPAC, MASS MoCA, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA.
A recipient of international awards, including an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2015), Art Matters Award (2017), The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019), Graham Foundation Award (2020) and an Andy Warhol Foundation LACE Lightning Fund (2022), their writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail; Parkett; X-TRA; Los Angeles Review of Books; Ajam Media Collective; Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value; and is forthcoming in All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection.
Khoshgozaran received their B.A. in photography from the University of Art in Tehran and an M.F.A. from the University of Southern California. They are a co-editor of MARCH: a journal of art and strategy and an editorial board member at X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal.
(Romi Ron Morrison / UCLA Arts)
Romi Ron Morrison
UCLA Arts welcomes a new faculty member to the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts: Assistant Professor Romi Ron Morrison.
Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator. Their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, ethics, and social infrastructure within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world — reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data.
Romi has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world including transmediale (Berlin), Alt_Cph Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and the Queens Museum (New York). They have been in residence at Eyebeam, New York University (ITP), the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and FemTechNet. Their writing has appeared in publications by MIT Press and University of California Press as well as the journals Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience and Logic(s).
Morrison received their Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (USC), an M.S. from Parsons School of Design, and two B.S. degrees from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They have taught courses at Parsons School of Design and USC.
(Ayasha Guerin / UCLA Arts)
Ayasha Guerin
UCLA Arts welcomes a new faculty member to the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance: Assistant Professor Ayasha Guerin.
Guerin is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, and curator of photography, video, and performance. They join UCLA Arts from the University of British Columbia (UBC), where they were assistant professor of Black diaspora studies in the Department of English. They were also faculty affiliate of the Centre for European Studies and the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at UBC.
Guerin’s first book project, Making Zone A, Nature, Race and Resilience on New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores, studies the colonial foundations of the city’s waterfront development from the 17th-19th century and traces how conquest, slavery, and racial capitalism have physically altered coastal environments and socio-ecological relations. Selections from this book have been published in Island Studies Journal, a special issue of Shima on coloniality and islands, and is forthcoming as chapters in two books: Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics (Actar, 2023) and a Routledge anthology on The Aquapelago and Aquapelagic Thinking.
Guerin is also engaged in art activism and curatorial research in Berlin. They have published a German language chapter in Sisters and Souls 2: Inspirationen durch May Ayim (2021) and their latest article, “Matter and Memory: Black Feminist Performance and Poetics in Berlin” (Meridians), describes their performance and activism as one of the founding members of Black Art Action Berlin. They also serve on the Black Feminist advisory board for Dekoloniale, a public office to “decolonize” Berlin’s memorial spaces and museum collections, and is a member of the Berlin-based curatorial research collective Curating through Conflict with Care.
In January, 2023, Guerin founded the Liberated Planet Studio, for artists and activists interested in ecological and movement research at the intersections of social and environmental justice.
Guerin holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Header image: From left to right, Samaa Elimam, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Ayasha Guerin, and Romi Ron Morrison.
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