Mahan Moalemi

Mahan Moalemi is a writer and doctoral candidate in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. His dissertation, tentatively titled “The Disabled Object: A Critique of Reparative Reason,” examines the forms of disablement among humans and objects, tracing their shared genealogies and geographies of debility and dispossession since the late eighteenth century. Mahan’s project examines the institutional dependencies of cultural heritage, its conditions of im/mobility, and the im/possibility of its return and restoration as reflected in the contemporary art of the African and Asian diasporas. He is the co‑editor of Ethnofuturisms (Merve Verlag, 2018), and has written for Art in America, Cabinet, Domus, e‑flux Criticism, frieze, and MoMA’s post, among other platforms, exhibition catalogues, artist monographs, and edited volumes, including chapters in two forthcoming books: Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2025) and The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Mahan is currently the 2024‑25 graduate curatorial intern in the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums.