Monday, March 16 | 5:30 PM
University of Michigan Museum of Art
525 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Helmut Stern Auditorium
Free and open to the public
Join Ismail Einashe, award-winning British-Somali writer and 2025-2026 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow, for a deeply personal presentation exploring how art can reclaim the humanity of migrants and their stories, too often lost in the headlines of global displacement.
Drawing on a decade of reporting on migration, his recent book “Strangers” by Tate Publishing, and his own journey from Somalia to Britain, alongside work from the likes of Mona Hatoum, Arshile Gorky, Tania Bruguera and more, Einashe will blend art, poetry, music and tales of a lost home—both humorous and harrowing, into an experience that is part artistic presentation, part storytelling session.
As he traces threads between artistic disciplines and his own experiences, he will recontextualise the migrant experience as an act of imagination, showing how art has the ability to challenge our dominant cultural narratives and bring us closer to the struggles and humanity of people we too easily categorise as ‘strangers’.
About Ismail Einashe
Ismail Einashe is a London-based journalist and author whose work on migration and refugee issues has appeared in numerous publications – including Foreign Policy, The Guardian, BBC News, The Nation, The Sunday Times and ArtReview. He is the author of “Strangers” (2023), a book by Tate Publishing that explores migration through the lens of art, and he co-edited “Lost in Media: Migrant Perspectives and the Public Sphere” (2019), a collection of critical essays examining how migrants are represented in European media. Einashe is also part of a team of journalists working on a cross-border journalism collaborative called Lost in Europe, which investigates the disappearance of child migrants.
Co-Sponosors
UMMA
Penny Stamp Speaker Series