Zaena Sheehan is a historian of contemporary art, with a particular focus on art of the post-2008 period. Her research focuses on the relations between art, politics, and subjectivation, specifically in relation to questions surrounding gender and racialisation.
Zaena completed her PhD in 2026 at University College London, where her doctoral project critically examined the politics and aesthetics of ‘life’ in contemporary art, centring artists whose work engages biological materials. Focussing on artists including Anicka Yi, Candice Lin, Nour Mobarak, and Mary Maggic, this research examined how biopolitical criteria underpin conceptions of biology, and how the materialisation of these dynamics in recent art sheds light on the historically specific forms of value through which life is mediated.
Building on her doctoral research, Zaena’s current book project historicises these artists’ practices in relation to longer debates concerning art and life, and the compensatory, sometimes contradictory, status biology has assumed across critical theory, political economy, and popular culture from the 2010s onwards. Ongoing research interests include art’s relation to biopolitics and historiographies of art and life, as well as discourses of feminism and materialism in art history and theory.
Education
PhD, University College London, 2026.
MA History of Art, University College London, 2021.
MA Curating the Art Museum, ĢƵ Institute of Art, 2020.
BA History of Art and French, Trinity College Dublin, 2019.
Teaching
Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, ‘Modern and Contemporary Art in London: Contemporary Art and Feminism, Dialogues and Debates,’ Department of History of Art, UCL, Autumn 2025.
Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, ‘History of the Category “Art,”’ Department of History of Art, UCL, Autumn 2024.
Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, ‘Thinking with’ EDI mentorship programme, Department of History of Art, UCL, October 2024.
Guest Lecturer, ‘The Social Lives of Artworks,’ Department of History of Art, UCL, December 2023.
Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, ‘Of Public Interest: Performance Art and Participation,’ Department of History of Art, UCL, Autumn 2023.
Publications, Conferences and Invited Talks
‘Dis-ease: Art, Illness, and Abstraction,’ panel co-convened with Elliot Gibbons, Association for Art History Conference, 10th April 2026.
‘A Gleaming Consistency We Can Never Get Enough Of: Pamela Rosenkranz’ Toxic Materialities,’ research seminar, University of Utrecht, 18th June 2025.
‘From Countercultures to Cybercultures to Starter Cultures: Materialisations of the Bacterial Self in Jenna Sutela’s nimiia cettii (2018),’ Object: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture 25 (2024).
‘From Systems to Symbiosis: Mapping the relational turn in recent contemporary art,’ 38th congrès du Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, Lyon, 27th June 2024.
‘Reflections on the recent work of Jenna Sutela,’ Health/Care: An exploratory workshop on the topic of health, Centre for the ĢƵ of Contemporary Art, UCL, 31st January 2023.
Research Interests
Contemporary art of the post-2008 period.
Questions of subjectivity, gender, and race.
Histories of art and life, and art and biopolitics.
Feminist, critical race, and materialist methodologies.