about

Leena Ghannam is a Ph.D. student in Art History at Stanford University, specializing in medieval Islamic art and architecture of the eastern Mediterranean. She spent her summer working at the Art Institute in Chicago as the McMullan Research Arts Intern for Islamic Art in the Arts of Africa Department.

Her research centers around the interaction between portable arts and architecture in the eastern Mediterranean, artistic syncretism (particularly of diasporic communities), the history of perception, spoliation and reuse, environmental history, and the archaeology and conservation of urban public spaces. 

Leena wrote her M.A. thesis on Fatimid Shi'i architectural iconography and her B.A. thesis on Levantine metalwork between Christian and Islamic cultures, winning an award for Outstanding Performance in the History of Art Honors Program.

Leena is the Closed Captions and Newsletter Editor at Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, an open-access project at the University of Michigan. She has also been a longtime collaborator for the Tracing Purple Porphyry Project, digitizing and tracking worldwide distribution of over 800 Roman Egyptian porphyry objects with ArcGIS.

Leena has worked and consulted for numerous organizations, including the the Islamic Arts Biennale in Saudi Arabia (2025), Google Arts and Culture, The Barakat Trust, Megawra (The Built Environment Collective), the Nadim Foundation, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Wayne State University Art Collection.