Nora N. Khan is a writer. Her practice takes the form of criticism, with a focus on digital visual culture and art that makes arguments through software, teaching, and a range of artistic collaborations, from opera librettos to installations. She is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design in Digital + Media (D+M), where she teaches writing, experimental criticism, critical theory and artistic research to graduate students (MFA) in D+M, Graphic Design, and Industrial Design. She is a longtime editor at Rhizome, and currently, Prototype, the book of Google’s Artist and Machine Intelligence Group. In 2020, she is guest curator of an exhibition at the Shed, Manual Override, which features Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry,  Simon Fujiwara, Morehshin Allahyari, and Martine Syms.

She has published fiction and criticism in magazines for ten years, in venues like Art in America, Flash Art, Village Voice, and Mousse. Her book Seeing, Naming, Knowing, a polemic on machine vision and predictive policing, was published in 2019 by The Brooklyn Rail, and into Spanish as Ser, Nombrar, Saber, by diSONARE (Mexico City). In 2017, with artist and writer Steven Warwick, she wrote Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information, 2017). Forthcoming is a new book, The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole, 2019). She also oftencontributes essays for exhibitions, such as Serpentine Galleries (Ian Cheng and Sondra Perry), MAXXI, HeK Basel, Chisenhale Gallery (Yuri Pattison), Venice Biennale – Estonian Pavilion (Katja Novitskova), Swiss Institute/Centre Pompidou and Kunstverein in Hamburg (Jeremy Shaw), in books published by Koenig Books,Sternberg, CURA, Mousse, and Information Office.

Last year, she collaborated with Sondra Perry, Caitlin Cherry, and American Artist to create a A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN at Performance Space, New York. Her writing has been supported by Fogo Island Arts (Islands Arts Writing Residency, 2019), a Critical Writing Grant (Visual Arts Foundation and Crossed Purposes Foundation, 2018), an Eyebeam Research Residency (2017), and a Thoma Foundation 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her essays have been translated into German, Italian, Thai, and Chinese.

Photo credit:  Film-maker Rea Tajiri.