Facilitator, Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography, traveling exhibition by Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari, from Arab  Image Foundation, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, 2005. Exhibition consists of four components: studio passport photographs, institutional group portrait photographs, itinerant portrait photographs, and street photographs. In contrast to Middle Eastern orientalist imagery, these photographs evidence a visual economy patronized by local inhabitants for personal reasons (itinerant photos), institutional imperatives (group photos), and government purposes (passport photos). As such, they make present what previously has been absent in Middle Eastern photographies. Karl Bassil, Zeina Massri, and Akram Zaatari in collaboration with Walid Raad , Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography, 2^nd edition (Beirut: Mind the Gap and Arab Image foundation, 2005) was published on the occasion of the exhibition.

Curator, Viewing Photographs Viewing Others, Krannert Art Museum, University  of Illinois, 2005. Exhibition groups together photographs taken mostly by European and American photographers of people mostly in the former colonial world, including Native Americans, plus photographs of and by African-Americans. Colonial photographs generally are based on the conceit that they are objective; they strive for the effect of being real. The market for such images consisted primarily of colonial residents, foreign tourists, and other buyers and collectors in Europe and North America. This market largely accounts for which scenes were chosen, how the image was composed, and the phrasing for titles and explanatory texts. Photographers represented include Walker Evans and Carrie Mae Weems, Laton Huffman and John Hillers, and Samuel Bourne and John Sache. These photographs, plus a stereopticon with cards, from the Krannert Art Museum collection are supplemented by two display cases of items on loan from David Prochaska. The first consists of a montage of postcards from Kenya, Algeria, Senegal, Korea, Martinique, and Côte d’Ivoire illustrating how stereotypical colonial and exoticist imagery is reproduced surprisingly often on postcolonial postcards. In the second case, the same photograph, Lehnert & Landrock’s, “The Prayer in the Desert,” is placed alongside four different books in which it was reprinted with different identifying information to illustrate how titles and captions shape the way we view an image: National Geographic (1911); Ernst Kuhnel, Picturesque North Africa (1925); Jane Livingston, Odyssey: The Art of Photography at National Geographic (1988); and Philippe Cardinal, L’Orient d’un photographe. Lehnert & Landrock (1987).

Co-curator (with David O’Brien),  Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, 2004. Traveled to Williams College, Dartmouth College and Louisiana State University, 2004-2005.