Nora Nahid Khan is a Warwick, Rhode Island-born American art critic, curator, and writer of fiction, non-fiction, and literary criticism. Khan has served on the Faculty of the University of California, Riverside, and at the Rhode Island School of Design. She was the executive director of the Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism from 2022 to 2023. In 2022 Nora Khan was appointed the first Editor-in-Residence of Topical Cream.https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/381766/nora-khan-appointed-inaugural-editor-in-residence/
Early life and education Born 23 October 1983 in Warwick, Rhode Island, Khan went on to study English literature at Harvard University, graduating in 2005. She was awarded the Thomas T. Hoopes, Class of 1919, Prize, which recognizes top senior theses, as well as the Edgar Eager Memorial Fund Prize. Khan continued her higher education with an M.F.A. in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa under an Iowa Arts Fellow scholarship from 2006 until she graduated 2008.
Writing
Khan has published in Rhizome, Art in America,"Nora Khan; articles in Art in America." Retrieved 1 April 2017. The California Sunday Magazine,"Defend and Protect", Nora Khan, California Sunday Magazine, September 2016 Retrieved 22 May 2017. Eyebeam,"These five artists are redefining technology." Retrieved 7 April 2017. Longform.org"Soda Plains", Nora Khan, 4Columns, April 2017. Retrieved 22 May 2017. and The Village Voice."Articles by Nora Khan in The Village Voice." Retrieved 1 April 2017. She has exhibited or worked on exhibits at Koenig Gallery "Khan, Nora, Towards Universal Pattern Recognition, exhibition text for Koenig Gallery." Retrieved 7 April 2017. and avant.org."Faulty Inventory Control". Retrieved 22 May 2017. She has published two books on media culture, including Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information, 2017) and Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2017). Forthcoming books on digital art and machine learning include No Context: AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries) and The Artificial and the Real, published (Art Metropole).
Curating Khan has organized and curated numerous exhibitions on the subjects of media art and digital art. In 2018, Khan co-organized the exhibition "A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN" at Performance Space New York. In 2019, she curated the group exhibition "Manual Override" at The Shed, which notably featured the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson. In 2023, she was the co-curator of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement.
Awards and recognition Khan's fiction has been recognized by numerous authorities in the genre. American writer, Katherine Vaz, for example, judged Khan the winner of the Hunger Mountain, Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize in 2008 for her story The Quarry."Hunger Mountain review including Nora Khan's fiction". Retrieved 1 April 2017. The following year, in 2009, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist in the Best Short Story Award for New Writers Competition."Nora Khan; Background." Retrieved 7 April 2017 In 2010, her short story Gunn, was judged runner-up in the American Literary Review Fiction Contest."Khan, Nora, Gunn, American Literary Review, 2010". Retrieved 1 April 2017.
In 2016, Khan was the winner of a US$20,000 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art for an Emerging Writer, awarded by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation."Thoma Foundation Announces Recipients of 2016 Arts Writing Awards in Digital Art." Retrieved 1 April 2017."Announcement on Artnews." Retrieved 7 April 2017. Later that year, she was announced as one of the new cohorts of research residents at Eyebeam, a center for art and technology in New York City."Eyebeam Fellows 2016-17 profiled by Technical.ly Brooklyn." Retrieved 7 April 2017 Khan's research and writing at Eyebeam focused on the history of computerized poetry, bots, and simulations."Nora Khan at Eyebeam." Retrieved 1 April 2014.
Other work Since September 2015, Khan has been a contributing critic at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as well as a contributing editor at Rhizome.,"Rhizome Profile, Nora Khan." Retrieved 1 April 2017. a not-for-profit arts organization that supports and provides a platform for new media art and artists and is based out of The New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan. In October 2016, she teamed up with curator Aria Dean and activist Grace Dunham to develop the Open Score"Open Score" Retrieved 22 May 2017 art and technology symposium at the New Museum.
Khan was published in the debut edition of Kill Screen magazine; Kill Screen Issue One: The No Fun Issue in 2010 "Kill Screen Issue One." Retrieved 31 March 2017. ASIN: B003P5MF2I and again in 2011 in the magazine's 3rd edition, Kill Screen #3: The Intimacy Issue. Khan's work has been published in a number of other printed and online forms, including the following titles by the Harvard Business School: Oprah Winfrey (TN), Bono and U2 (TN), and Gary Hirshberg and Stonyfield Farm."Nora Khan citations in Harvard Business School publications." Retrieved 1 April 2014. She has contributed to exhibition and artist catalogs, such as the 2016 publication Dawn Mission, edited by Bettina Steinbrügge, about the artwork of Katja Novitskova,"Dawn Mission, Steinbrügge, Bettina (Ed), with text by Nora N. Khan, 2016." Retrieved 7 April 2017. published by Mousse Publishing to coincide with an exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg "Dawn Mission, Steinbrügge, Bettina, Mousse Publishing, 2016". Retrieved 1 April 2014.
In November 2016, she joined Christiane Paul (curator) and artist Ian Cheng at the Whitney Museum of American Art in a public discussion about digital art criticism."Digital Art Criticism Now." Retrieved 22 May 2017 In February 2017, she spoke at Transmediale in Berlin as part of the media art festival's 30th anniversary. She spoke on a panel called The Alien Middle with German artist, designer, and writer Sascha Pohflepp as well as Dulling Down - The Obsolescence of Intelligence with curator and theorist Inke Arns and Dutch conceptual artist Constant Dullaart."Nora Khan speaker schedule at Transmediale, 2017." Retrieved 1 April 2017 Her speaking appointments in Berlin coincided with the release of the Transmediale exhibition catalog, Alien Matter, to which Khan contributed an essay."Transmediale 2017 exhibition catalog, by curator Inke Arns." Retrieved 7 April 2017."Alien Matter exhibition catalog." Retrieved 7 April 2017. Khan was also a guest speaker at the parallel CTM Festival, where she presented her original research Fear Indexing the X-Files with artist Steven Warwick"Nora Khan at CTM Festival." Retrieved 1 April 2014
Khan is currently working on a series of long-form essays that address the questions of how AI and bots will affect human and artistic creativity."Interview with 2016 Digital Arts Writing Awards Recipient, Nora Khan, Thoma Foundation, 2016." Retrieved 22 May 2017.
References
External links Personal site Faulty Inventory Control Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence DIS Magazine Archive Deep Mining; Deep Time, Nora N. Khan on Jussi Parikka Companion Text for Yuri Pattison’s Free Traveller at Cell Project Space Khan, Nora, Dreams of Neural Networks, in ETC Media, 2017 Khan, Nora, What's in a Rave, POSTmatter, 2016 Khan, Nora, I was a shameless self-promoter for a week and no one called me on my fake book, Hopes & Fears, 2015 Khan, Nora, Casey Reas’s Disconcerting Software Paintings, The Village Voice, October 13, 2016 ETC Media, Essay by Nora N. Khan in Issue 110 Printed Matter, Lecture by Nora Khan at the launch of The 3D Additivist Cookbook, by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, 2016.