Prof Shahidha Bari | |
---|---|
Born | 1980 (age 43–44) |
Nationality | British |
Education | King's College, Cambridge |
Occupation(s) | Academic, critic, broadcaster |
Employer | University of the Arts London |
Shahidha Bari (born 1980) is a British academic, critic and broadcaster in the fields of literature, philosophy and art. [1] [2] She is a professor at the University of the Arts London based at London College of Fashion. [3] She is a host of the topical arts television programme Inside Culture on BBC Two, standing in for Mary Beard, [4] one of the presenters of the BBC Radio 4 arts and ideas programme Free Thinking (previously titled Night Waves), [5] and an occasional presenter of BBC Radio 4's Front Row. [6]
She was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and lives in London. She is a Fellow of the Forum for Philosophy at the London School of Economics and an arts reviewer for a number of publications. [7] She comes from a family of Bengali Muslims.
Her academic work moves between philosophy, literature and visual culture. Her book Dressed: The Philosophy of Clothes was published in 2019. [8] [9] Her latest book, Look Again: Fashion is a viewer's guide to fashion in the Tate Britain art collection. [10]
In 2011, Bari was selected as one of ten BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, [11] a new project launched in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to communicate academic research to a wider audience. She is the winner of the 2014/15 Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize, for a "powerful and insightful" review of the National Theatre's Medea. [12]
In print, her writing appears in The Financial Times, [13] The Observer and the New Statesman. She is one of the regular books reviewers for The Guardian [14] and The Times Literary Supplement, [15] a contributor to Aeon [16] and frieze [17] and appears as a cultural critic on BBC TV. [18] She has presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service.
Bari was on the board of the educational mentoring charity The Arts Emergency Service and currently is a trustee of the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Art Night. [19] She was the chair of judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2019, [20] a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2020 [21] and on the judging panel for The Booker Prize 2022. [22]