Anthony Downey

Anthony Downey

Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa

Birmingham School of Art
Email:
anthony.downey@bcu.ac.uk
Phone:
0121 331 5970

Dr Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University), where his research and teaching focuses on contemporary visual cultures and practice-based research, postcolonial theory and praxis, digital methodologies, machine vision and AI, pedagogical networks, and interdisciplinary knowledge production. In his role as Associate Director of Research for External Funding, Anthony oversees AHRC funding application development and supports REF research outputs for early career and senior career researchers. He co-convenes the Art Activisms (AA) research cluster at Birmingham Institute of Creative Arts (BICA), where he develops collaborative partnerships across Birmingham and internationally.

In his capacity as BCU lead, he is the Cultural and Commissioning Lead on a four-year £2.2 million Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project (where his research focuses on decolonizing knowledge systems, institutional development, and the expansion of educational and cultural provision for people with disabilities in Lebanon, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Jordan). The latter award was preceded by an AHRC Development Award (2019-2021).

Anthony is an editor at three Peer-Reviewed, Open Access journals, including Third Text (Routledge), Journal of Digital War (Palgrave MacMillan), and Memory, Mind & Media (Cambridge University Press). He is also the series editor for Research/Practice (Sternberg Press).

Recent and upcoming publications include Decolonising Vision: Algorithmic Anxieties and the Post-Digital Image (forthcoming, MIT Press, 2024); Nida Sinnokrot: Palestine is Not a Garden (Sternberg Press/MIT Press, 2024); Trevor Paglen: Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (Sternberg Press/MIT Press, 2024); Khalil Rabah: Falling Forward-Works 1995- 2025 (Sharjah Art Foundation and Hatje Cantz, 2023); Shona Illingworth: Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press/Power Plant, 2022); Heba Y. Amin: The General's Stork (Sternberg Press, 2020); Larissa Sansour: Heirloom (Sternberg Press, 2020), Michael Rakowitz: I'm good at love, I'm good at hate, it's in between I freeze (Sternberg Press, 2019); Critique in Practice (Sternberg Press, 2019); Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East (Sternberg Press, 2016); and Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2015).

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