Ila Nicole Sheren

Ila Nicole Sheren

Associate Professor, Department of Art History & Archaeology

Ila Sheren is a specialist in contemporary political art, focusing on the way that borders are expressed and theorized within visual culture. She is the author of Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera (2015) and Border Ecology: Art and Environmental Crisis at the Margins (2023). Her work has appeared in interdisciplinary venues including the Journal of Borderlands Studies and GeoHumanities. She is the principal investigator for the CRE2-funded “innovation space” Race and Community Art on the U.S.-Mexico Border: A Collaborative Mapping Project, and is a faculty lead on the project Moving Stories, funded by the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures. Ila received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 and has been at Washington University since 2013.