Dr Leila Nassereldein

Curator & Artistic Director · Writer · Critical Theorist
Exhibitions · Artistic Commissioning · Public Programmes · Institutional Strategy

Dr Leila Nassereldein is a British curator and artistic director of Sudanese patrilineage, writer and critical theorist based between London and Cairo and working internationally. Her research-led practice moves across contemporary art, academia, cultural institutions and independent artistic production. She develops exhibitions, commissions, publications and public programmes in which critical thought becomes spatial, editorial, organisational and public form.

Her work spans installation, moving image, photography, sound, fashion, archives, publishing and experimental music. She leads projects from their earliest research and artistic propositions through artist selection, commissioning, partnership-building, finance, contracting, production, interpretation and public presentation.

Practice

Nassereldein works across both the artwork and the structures through which cultural production becomes possible. Her practice encompasses:

• curatorial and artistic direction;
• artistic commissioning and artist development;
• interdisciplinary exhibitions and public programmes;
• critical writing, editing, research and sonic essays;
• institutional strategy and organisational development;
• public learning, teaching and community co-curation;
• archives, collections and cultural memory;
• artist management and international programming.

She is particularly skilled at bringing artists, researchers, communities, designers, technologists and institutions into productive relation. Her work combines intellectual ambition with collaborative leadership and the organisational precision required to deliver complex cultural projects.

Critical theory as practice

Grounded in political aesthetics and historical materialism, Nassereldein approaches culture as a contradictory social process rather than an autonomous realm. Images and artworks are shaped by labour, technology, finance, institutions and historical power, yet they cannot be reduced entirely to those conditions. Art can also disclose what established systems repress, exclude or fail to recognise.

Critical theory is therefore not an interpretation added to her work after it has been made. It operates through the work itself: in the architecture of an exhibition, the terms of a commission, the organisation of an archive, the structure of a publication and the relations established between artists, institutions and publics.

Nassereldein considers not only what cultural forms mean, but how they are produced, funded, mediated, circulated and remembered. Budgets, contracts, collections, credit, institutional procedures and working cultures are understood as active conditions of cultural production. Her practice brings critical attention to these structures while retaining the ability to operate and transform them.

Her materialism also extends beyond human subjects. Plants, water, soil, dust, architecture, sound and infrastructure enter her work as historical forces shaped by labour, extraction, technology, climate and political economy. This approach connects contemporary art with questions of ecology, urbanism, migration, social reproduction and cultural memory.

Research and institutional leadership

Nassereldein holds an AHRC-funded PhD in Political Aesthetics from Birkbeck, University of London. Her doctoral research developed the collated aesthetic: a historiographic and compositional method through which images, texts, voices, objects and sounds are brought into constellation without being forced into equivalence or a single resolved narrative.

Meaning emerges through correspondence, interruption and dissonance, while historical gaps and exclusions remain perceptible. This method continues to shape her exhibitions, publications, teaching and experimental audio work, enabling different disciplines and forms of knowledge to enter relation without losing their specificity.

At London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, Nassereldein became a core programme lead in establishing the public-facing cultural programme and three-floor gallery at East Bank. Her work brought together curatorial direction, artistic commissioning, programme strategy, public learning, community co-curation, institutional partnerships and multidisciplinary production. She combined artistic leadership with responsibility for substantial programme budgets, fundraising, contracts, procurement, risk, reporting and the coordination of staff, artists and external partners.

Projects including Designed for Life, Nana’s House, Collective Care and Fashioning Frequencies connected installation, moving image, sound, fashion, archives, gaming and social history. She also led the development of UAL’s successful National Lottery Heritage Fund bid for Making More Mischief, translating curatorial and community ambitions into a funded programme with defined partnerships, budgets, outcomes and evaluation.

Her wider institutional experience includes Turner Contemporary, the British Library and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. At the British Library, she identified a structural absence in the national collection’s acquisition of non-ISBN zines and artists’ books, developed a new collecting strategy and acquired more than 150 works directly from independent makers. The project translated critical research into a lasting change in collecting practice.

At Turner Contemporary, she contributed historical research, interpretation and editorial work to projects involving Larry Achiampong, Steve McQueen and Barbara Walker. Her academic practice has included teaching and supervision across political aesthetics, modern and contemporary art, curatorial studies, film, colonialism and international visual culture at Birkbeck, London College of Fashion and Winchester School of Art.

Independent cultural production

Nassereldein is the founding director of GODPARENT Bookings, an international artist agency and programming platform rooted in experimental music, performance, moving image and sound culture.

Through GODPARENT, she sets artistic direction, develops programmes, represents and supports artists, negotiates fees and contracts, builds international partnerships and directs live production. The platform extends her research and curatorial practice into the economic and organisational realities of independent artistic labour.

Across institutions, academia and independent culture, Nassereldein is distinguished by her ability to think at the scale of the artwork and the institution at once. She combines curatorial authorship, intellectual research, strategic leadership and practical delivery, repeatedly translating critical inquiry into new commissions, public forms and durable organisational change.

Her practice asks not only what culture represents, but what conditions it creates: whose labour it sustains, which histories and forms of knowledge it makes legible, how authority and resources are organised, and what other relations might be brought into public life.