Reclaiming Futures
Curatorial Team
Dr. Nadia Christidi
Dr. Nadia Christidi is an academic and arts practitioner. Her research focuses on how the future of water is being imagined and prepared for in cities facing water supply challenges, which are intensifying with climate change, including Dubai and Los Angeles. Nadia was formerly a TBA-21 Academy Ocean Fellow, a Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellow for Water Solutions at MIT’s Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, a Delfina Foundation curatorial/research fellow, and an Art Jameel Arts Research and Writing Resident. She is committed to working at the intersection of art, science, and policy, and producing public programming around her research to engage diverse audiences. Her work and programs have been presented at Beirut Art Center, SALT Galata, SALT Ulus, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Jameel Arts Centre, the Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival, and Ocean Space in Venice. Nadia holds a PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society from MIT and is a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project Governing through Design.
Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen
Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Schaufler Lab at Technische Universität Dresden. Her recent research explores the intersection of data worlds with urban, migrant, and environmental movements that challenge profit-driven and extractive modes of futurity. She is also a member of the multimodal project Governing through Design, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Eylül earned her PhD in the Program of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University. Her dissertation examines the geopolitical aesthetic of computational media, focusing on media histories and artistic practices within the context of the Middle East. From 2020 to 2024, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Eylül has published extensively in edited volumes, art catalogues, and academic journals, including Ethnic and Racial Studies and Organised Sound. She co-edited the volume Displacing Theory Through the Global South with Iracema Dulley, published by ICI Berlin Press in 2024. She has taught courses on digital media and arts at Universität der Künste Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she collaborates with Shintaro Miyazaki on alternative futures of computing through the web-based research exchange platform Counter-N.