Anneka Lenssen specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, and Third World humanism.
She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020), which won the 2021 Syrian Studies Association Best Book Prize and was shortlisted for the MSA Book Prize. She is also co-editor, with colleagues Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers, of a volume of art writing from the Arab world in translation: Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. Her article “Abstraction of the Many? Finding Plenitude in Arab Painting,” for Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab world, 1950s-1980s (2020), won the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation Prize for a Critical Essay on Contemporary Art. She is a recipient of the Toban Family Faculty Fellowship. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute; the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley; and the Hellman Family Foundation; among numerous other granting agencies.
Current projects include two books: 1) A monograph, tentatively titled Modern Art in the Breach: Baghdad, 1941-1945, examining the peculiar friendships enacted through the late colonial reoccupation of the Arab countries during the Second World War. 2) A co-edited volume, Chronicle of the 1980s: Representational Pressures, Departures, and Beginnings in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. Comprised of more than fifty-five essays by more than forty scholars, each focused on a specific object or event, the book aims to detail how the departures and beginnings undertaken by Arab, Iranian and Turkish artists—situated in the region’s military mobilizations, economic “openings” (and closures), religious reconfigurations, and diasporic trajectories, among other events—are central to understanding both the emergence of contemporary art practices and the stakes of the category “contemporary art” itself.
Lenssen has been engaged in several curatorial collaborations meant to give a public dimension to aspects of her research. Most recently, Lenssen worked with Stefania Pandolfo and the members of Abounaddara, an anonymous collective of Syrian filmmakers, on an exhibition titled Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry, at the Berkeley Art Museum, October 9-February 23, 2025. The exhibition was made possible by a Mellon Project Grant provided by the Division of the Arts & Humanities Dean’s office. Over the academic year 2022-23, Lenssen worked with a team of students enrolled in her 192Cu curatorial seminar to organize Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization for the Brown Gallery of Doe Library. In 2023, she was a consulting scholar for the exhibition A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran at The Drawing Center in New York.
She is on the Editorial Board of Representations and ARTMargins, and a faculty affiliate of the Arts Research Center and of the department of Middle East Languages and Cultures. She is also an Investigator with the Arab Art Archive project at Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi.
