Writer and visual activist
Author of White Sight: Visual Politics and Practice of Whiteness (MIT Press, 2023).
Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU.
Find my work via ORCID.
Find my 2023 newsletter “The Week in White Sight.”
My older blog posts are still here.
Find my Bibliography here with extensive downloads.
Personal statement
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. He is chair of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. In 2020-21 he was ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation, New York.
He published two books in 2023: White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (MIT Press) and the third edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture (Routledge).
Among his earlier publications, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013.
How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into eleven languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015.
The Appearance of Black Lives Matter was published in 2017 as a free e-book, and in 2018 as a limited edition print book with a graphic essay by Carl Pope and a poem by Karen Pope, both by NAME Publications, Miami.
Since the 2017 events Charlottesville, he has been active in the movement to take down statues commemorating settler colonialism and/or white supremacy and convened the 2017 collaborative syllabus All The Monuments Must Fall, fully revised after the 2020 events.
He curated “Decolonizing Appearance,” an exhibit at the Center for Art Migration Politics (September 2018-March 2019) and collaborated on a global public art project in 2020 with artist Carl Pope, poet Karen Pope and gallerist Lisa Martin, entitled “The Bad Air Smelled of Roses.”
A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, Frieze, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.