Nora N. Khan

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, editor, and educator. She is internationally recognized for her essays and short books, marked by a hybrid, genre-defiant prose style. Formally, this work attempts to both theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and outline the future of creative production in a technocratic age.

Her notable essay Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence, has been published and reprinted in ten languages since 2015. For 15 years, her prose and research have focused on artists’ most trenchant ideas and models of experimentation, paired with steady critique of technological design. In particular, her work on the philosophy of AI/ML, with a focus on ‘incomputable’ knowledge and the knotty relationship of language to computation, is referenced heavily by writers, theorists, artists, and practitioners across fields.

Khan’s writing has been supported by a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation, the Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and residencies at La Becque, Eyebeam, Fogo Island Arts, and on.

Early – and catalyzing – writing awards include the prestigious Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, awarded annually to Harvard University undergraduates for “outstanding scholarly work or research” and the Iowa Arts Fellowship, a one-year award supporting her first year as an MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Her book Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2019) focused on machine vision and generative image production. With Steven Warwick, she wrote Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information, 2017), on online conspiracy theories and fan forum culture. Forthcoming are AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries), The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole), and a memoir about criticism through Strange Attractor Press.

She has written over 200 features, essays, interviews, and long-form reviews. Significant essays on the practices of Tony Conrad, Gretchen Bender, Josh Kline, Sondra Perry, Ian Cheng, Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, and many others have been published in internationally-distributed journals, magazines, and books, along with catalogs for Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, Centre Pompidou, and Swiss Institute. PDFs of print essays and reviews are available upon request.

Khan is sought out for her curatorial work with artists developing experimental, demanding projects. She is part of the 2026 Curatorial Ensemble of Counterpublic, one of the nation’s largest public exhibitions, with Steffi Hessler, Raphael Fonseca, Jordan Carter, and Wanda Nanibush, with a focus on ‘near futures’.

She was the Co-Curator with Andrea Bellini of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, hosted by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. The edition was the highest-attended in the biennale’s history, and featured all new commissions by Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, American Artist, Interspecifics, Alfatih, Shuang Li, Diego Marcon, Lawrence Lek, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Sheila Chukwulozie, Emmanuel van der Auwera, Formafantasma, Aziz Hazara, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sahej Rahal, and Jenna Sutela. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed in New York City in 2020, she worked with Sondra Perry and Morehshin Allahyari on new commissions, in an exhibition that featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms. Manual Override saw 30,000 visitors in 2 months.

Khan’s practice extends on to teaching, mentorship, public speaking, and continual development of para-institutional learning spaces around the world. From 2024 to 2025, she served as Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Khan was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching at Rhode Island School of Design, where she was a professor in Digital + Media from 2018 to 2021. With Maya Indira Ganesh she created AI Anarchies: Experiments in Study, Collective Learning and Unlearning, a school, a conference, and a gathering over a week in Berlin at Akademie der Künste around the concept of an ‘anarchic AI.’

Khan was a longtime editor (2014-2021) at Rhizome, served as guest editor of HOLO, producing the well-received Mirror Stage; Between Computability and its Opposite (2021), and as Editor-in-Residence at Topical Cream.

Khan’s practice extends to a large range of long-term collaborations and ‘public epistolary’ conversations with musicians, artists, theorists, and performers. Early work with musicians on PAN – including Steven Warwick, Lars TCF Holdhus, and label founder Bill Kouligas – created a foundation. She co-wrote essays with theorist, musician, and critic DeForrest Brown, Jr. from 2014 to 2018.

She created: a libretto for Kouligas’ 2018 opera Decession with Spiros Hadjidjanos and sung by Pan Daijing at Volksbuhne Berlin; a virtual influencer with Sam Rolfes/Team Rolfes for Unsound Festival, and has ghostwritten many performance scripts.

Her 2018 collaboration A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN with Sondra Perry, Caitlin Cherry, and American Artist resulted in a tiny house, a garden, a film, and a library at Performance Space, New York.