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 鈥榣ife鈥 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鈥檚 current book project historicises these artists鈥 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鈥檚 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, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2020.
BA History of Art and French, Trinity College Dublin, 2019.
Teaching
Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, 鈥楳odern and Contemporary Art in London: Contemporary Art and Feminism, Dialogues and Debates,鈥 Department of History of Art, UCL, Autumn 2025.
Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, ‘History of the Category 鈥淎rt,鈥濃 Department of History of Art, UCL, Autumn 2024.
Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, 鈥楾hinking with鈥 EDI mentorship programme, Department of History of Art, UCL, October 2024.
Guest Lecturer,聽 鈥楾he Social Lives of Artworks,鈥 Department of History of Art, UCL, December 2023.
Postgraduate Teaching Assistant, 鈥極f Public Interest: Performance Art and Participation,鈥 Department of History of Art, UCL, Autumn 2023.
Publications, Conferences and Invited Talks
鈥楧is-ease: Art, Illness, and Abstraction,鈥 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鈥 Toxic Materialities,鈥 research seminar, University of Utrecht, 18th June 2025.
鈥楩rom Countercultures to Cybercultures to Starter Cultures: Materialisations of the Bacterial Self in Jenna Sutela鈥檚 nimiia cettii (2018),鈥 Object: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture 25 (2024).
鈥楩rom Systems to Symbiosis: Mapping the relational turn in recent contemporary art,鈥 38th congr猫s du Comit茅 International d鈥橦istoire de l鈥橝rt, Lyon, 27th June 2024.
鈥楻eflections on the recent work of Jenna Sutela,鈥 Health/Care: An exploratory workshop on the topic of health, Centre for the 91制片厂 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.