Nada Shabout is an art historian, curator, and educator renowned for her pioneering scholarship and curatorial work on modern and contemporary Arab art. She holds a Ph.D. in Humanities with a concentration in Art History and Criticism from the University of Texas at Arlington. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA), and the founding director of the Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA). Her curatorial projects include Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art (2010), Interventions: A Dialogue Between the Modern and the Contemporary (2010), and All Manners of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group (2025–2026). She served as the Project Advisor for the Saudi National Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Dr. Shabout's scholarly publications encompass Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (2007), New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century (2009), and Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018). Her research addresses the art historical neglect of modern and contemporary Arab art and its absence from the art history canon.