Kamala GhaneaBassiri is an emerging curator and scholar working at the intersections of contemporary art, religion, and material culture, specifically on living artists’ diverse engagements with Islam. Kamala currently serves as a Spiritual Pedagogies Fellow at the Dia Art Foundation and has worked in curatorial departments at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), and the Perlman Teaching Museum. Their recent curatorial projects include The Manifest, The Hidden: Geometry and Islam in Contemporary Art (2026) at the Perlman and Temporarily Ours: Contemporary Photography and Film (2025) at SCMA, which was featured in the Boston Art Review. They hold a bachelor’s degree in religious studies from Carleton College and are pursuing a joint master’s degree at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music, where they were awarded the Dominique de Menil Scholarship.
