Sarah Johnson

Biography

Sarah Johnson is a curator whose research centres on modern and contemporary art from the Middle East, with a particular emphasis on Iraq. Her other research interests include intellectual histories of modernism in the region and provenance histories of Middle Eastern objects in museums. She is a curator for the Middle East and North Africa collections at the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands.

Previously, Johnson was a curator of Islamic Collections at the British Museum in London (2015–2016). She was also a researcher in the curatorial department at the Smithsonian Institution, Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC (2011–2012), where she helped to organise the permanent galleries of ancient Iran and the travelling exhibition, Roads of Arabia. 

Johnson’s recent publications include a chapter in the monograph Tracing Constellations: Belonging and Exile in the Practice of Walid Siti (Kehrer Verlag, 2020) and Impure Time: Archaeology, Hafidh Druby (1914-1991), and the persistence of representational art in mid-twentieth century Iraq (1940-1980) (Arab Studies Journal, 2020).

She earned a Bachelor's degree in art and archaeology from Princeton University (2010) and an MPhil in Islamic art and archaeology from the University of Oxford (2014). She received her PhD in Art History from Freie Universität Berlin (2019). Her doctoral dissertation focused on the Iraqi artist Hafidh Druby (1914–1991) and alternative aesthetic modernities in the Middle East.

Born in 1988 in New York City, Johnson currently lives and works in Amsterdam.

SAF participation:
March Meeting 2021