Kirsten Scheid is Professor of Anthropology and Art Studies at the American University of Beirut. Scheid is the author of Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920–1950 (Indiana University Press, 2022) and editor of Partisans of the Nude: An Arab Art Genre in an Era of Contest, 1920–1960 (Columbia University Press, 2024). Focusing on imaginations and ontologies through an Anthropology of Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, she examines the aesthetics and institutions of modernity, and the contemporary practices by which artists and their audiences reshape their colonized, liberated, and post-colonial societies. Scheid was the Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow (2019–2020) and a founding member of the Global DeCenter Network. She has curated art exhibitions in Beirut, Jerusalem, and New York.