Tausif Noor studies global modern and contemporary art with a focus on South Asia and its histories of decolonization. His research interests broadly concern modernism's imbrication with nationalism and internationalism, postcolonialism, and Marxist thought. He is at work on a dissertation that charts a critical history of modernist visual practices and their entanglements with humanist philosophy and humanitarianism during East Pakistan’s transition to independent Bangladesh, between the 1947 Partition of India and the aftermath of the 1971 Liberation War.
Noor holds a BA in Art History with a minor in Government from Dartmouth College, and an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London. He was a 2014-15 Fulbright Student Fellow in India, where he worked at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art. His criticism and essays—for which he received a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the 2023 Grace Dudley Arts Writers Prize from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and the 2025 Holt Prize from Lambda Literary—appear in journals and periodicals including Art History, Art Margins, Artforum, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, as well as in various exhibition catalogues and edited volumes. From 2017-20, he was the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the ICA Philadelphia, and he has also worked at the Whitney Museum and the Imperial War Museum. He is Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), where he supports the development and realization of exhibitions, programs, and publications. At BAMPFA, he co-curated the collection exhibitions Some Particular Heaven: Ideas of Utopia in the BAMPFA Collection (2026-27) and To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)Permanent Collection (2024-25), among others, and has contributed to various monographic, group, and traveling exhibitions. He is also an editor at Selva, an open access peer-reviewed journal of the history and historiography of art.