Nitasha Dhillon, PhD Media Study ‘20
Nitasha Dhillon
Scholar/Practitioner
Nitasha Dhillon is a writer, artist, educator, and organizer. Dhillon has a B.A. in Mathematics from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and School of International Center of Photography. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Media Study, University of Buffalo in New York in 2020.
Along with Amin Husain, Dhillon is the founder of MTL Collective, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, and action in its practice. MTL Collective, in turn, has founded Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), a direct action wing of Gulf Labor Artist Coalition as well as MTL+, the collective facilitating Decolonize This Place (DTP).
DTP is an action-oriented movement that blurs the lines between art, organizing and action around six strands of struggle: Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage worker, de-gentrification, and dismantle patriarchy. Since 2016, Decolonize This Place has organized an Indigenous Peoples Day/Anti-Columbus Day tour of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City involving over 1,000 participants.
Dhillon is a scholar practitioner working across several disciplines. Dhillon’s writings have been published in October, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Hyperallergic, Dissent Magazine, Creative Time Reports, and Brooklyn Rail, among others. She is a contributing author with Paula Chakravartty to The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor edited by Andrew Ross from Oregon Books.
Dhillon’s projects have been exhibited in many art and architecture exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, The 2019 Orleans Architectural Biennale, Orleans Architectural Biennale, Qalandia International, and most recently the Sharjah biennale.
Dhillon has lectured at major universities in the United States and abroad including at Brown University, Magnum Foundation, SUNY Stony Brook, University of Chicago, SUNY Purchase, University of Colorado, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the School of Visual Arts. Most recently, Dhillon presented for the 3rd Rencontres of the Franz Fanon Foundation on “Visual Art and Decolonial Aesthetics in the Spirit of Bandung” at Rutgers University Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies.