Prof Shahidha Bari | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1980 (age 44–45) |
| 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 aprofessor at theUniversity of the Arts London based atLondon College of Fashion.[3] She is a host of the topical arts television programmeInside Culture onBBC Two, standing in forMary Beard,[4] one of the presenters of theBBC Radio 4 arts and ideas programmeFree Thinking (previously titledNight Waves),[5] and an occasional presenter ofBBC Radio 4'sFront Row.[6]
She was educated atKing's College, Cambridge, and lives in London. She is a Fellow of theForum for Philosophy at theLondon 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 bookDressed: 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 theArts 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 theNational Theatre'sMedea.[12]
In print, her writing appears inThe Financial Times,[13]The Observer and theNew Statesman. She is one of the regular books reviewers forThe Guardian[14] andThe Times Literary Supplement,[15] a contributor toAeon[16] andfrieze[17] and appears as a cultural critic on BBC TV.[18] She has presented documentaries forBBC Radio 4 and theBBC World Service.
Bari was on the board of the educational mentoring charityThe Arts Emergency Service and currently is a trustee of theBrontë Parsonage Museum and Art Night.[19] She was the chair of judges for theForward Prizes for Poetry in 2019,[20] a judge for theBaillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2020[21] and on the judging panel forThe Booker Prize 2022.[22]
