Nageen Shaikh is an art historian, critic, and educator. As an indie arts and culture publications editor, she works with organizations and individuals on monographs, books, biographies, and academic and narrative texts.
Nageen has a particular interest in artists’ studios and artisanal workshops, material histories and economies, routes of artistic and object exchange, and languages. Her scholarship explores entanglements between networks, conditions of production, artists lived realities, and materiality in South Asian and global art practices. Her essay on the role of material, sociological, and linguistic mediators in the formative years of Ismail Gulgee’s art career, analyzed under the Actor-network Theory, was published in Gulgee Museum: A Handbook (Lightstone Publisher, 2025). Another peer-reviewed paper fusing art historical and anthropological methods to examine processual knowledges from Pakistani ceramic studios via the case of ceramist Shazia Zuberi was published in the Journal of Art and Design Education Pakistan, by the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2025.
Nageen writes art and book criticism for Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Dawn News, The Karachi Collective, and others. She has counselled youth, and managed research, community, and donor-centric projects for The Citizens Foundation, Karachi Biennale Trust, Guggenheim Museum, Gulgee Museum, and British Council. She developed and taught interdisciplinary liberal arts curricula at undergraduate institutions in Pakistan. She earned a BDes in Industrial and Product Design from the University of Karachi and studied Art History and Criticism at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as a Fulbright scholar.
Committed to anti-oppressive frameworks and merit-based contribution in the arts, she has served on several juries, including the Winter Artist in Residence program at the University of Toronto—Mississauga; the Langdon A. Malik Performance Art Prize for the Karachi Biennale; and scholarship adjudication for TCF. Nageen’s lifelong passions include making, editing, publishing, writing, and reading books; playing sports; and learning languages. Travel to Japan continues to be on the bucket list. She can be reached at nageen@thekarachicollective.com and www.nageenshaikh.com