Nada Shabout Earns UNT Presidential Excellence Award
UNT’s most prestigious and coveted honor that is given to current faculty, staff or students honors individuals for significant and superb accomplishments that have been recognized nationally. Recipients help to elevate UNT as a prominent institution of higher education and are icons of excellence who inspire others to soar to new heights of success. The award for faculty or staff recipients includes a $10,000 cash prize, and the award for student recipients includes the equivalent of a semester of standard resident tuition, up to $5,000.
This year’s faculty recipient, Nada Shabout, is a professor of art history and the coordinator of UNT’s Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey, and is widely recognized as one of the world’s most important art historians.
Shabout is the founder and project director of the Modern Art Iraq Archive; a former member of the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project and of the International Editorial Advisory Board; and subject editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. One of the “Eight Influential Female Art Historians You Should Know” according to artsy.net, she recently received a $50,000 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant to work on her new book, “The Dialectics of the Decorative in Iraqi Art.”
See the video below, which details more about Professor Shabout's world-renowned work to study and preserve modern and contemporary Arab and Iraqi art.