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Dr Katarzyna Falęcka is Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art Department, School of Arts and Cultures, and Head of Art History. She specialises in modern and contemporary art from Northern Africa and its diasporas, with a particular focus on questions of archives, memory, gender and transregional cultural exchanges.

Her first monograph is currently under contract with Manchester University Press. The book explores the work of contemporary artists who engage with the photographic archives of Algerian decolonisation against the background of ongoing restitution discussions, as well as a surge in independent archiving projects in Algeria. From 2025 until 2027, Falęcka co-leads (together with Dr Przemysław Strożek from the Polish Academy of Sciences) an AHRC-funded international research project on the artistic exchanges and cultural transfers between the former Eastern Bloc and Northern Africa during the Global Cold War, 1940s-1980s.

Falęcka has published articles in journals including African Arts (2022) and Third Text (2023), contributed chapters to the Wiley Blackwell Companion to French Art (2025) and exhibition catalogues, and curated the exhibition at apexart in New York (2021). A recipient of fellowships at the John Kluge Center, Library of Congress, Washington DC; the Centre d’Études Maghrébines à Tunis, Tunis; the African Art Department, Free University Berlin, Berlin; and the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb, Tunis, she also set up and curates the  podcast series. In 2026, she was awarded the Sharjah Publishing Grant for a short book titled. Falęcka completed her AHRC-funded PhD at University College London under the supervision of Professor Tamar Garb and Professor Azzedine Haddour, received her MA from University of Oxford thanks to the Edgar Wind Scholarship, and completed her BA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Prospective PhD students working on modern and contemporary art in Northern Africa and West Asia, colonialism, archives, gender, memory, transregional cultural exchanges, and photography are welcome to submit a research proposal.

Art Histories I and II; Cultures and Histories of Display; Histories of Photography; Contemporary Art and Globalisation; Dissertation Supervision; Photography Forum; Contemporary Art History: Theories and Methods (MA module)

PhD Supervision

Paulina Michnowska, 'Tracing Memory: Clay in Relation to an Endangered Rainforest Sign Language of the Penan Hunter-Gatherers. Proposing an Aesthetic Practice as Means of Ethnographic Research', co-supervised with Professor Andrew Burton.

Youcef Hadjazi, 'Decoding Masculine Performativities: Algerian Café Culture (El Kahwa)'

Chloe Chen, 'Hybrid Bodyscape: Performing the Diasporic Self in Britain, 1980s-2000s'

• Articles

  • Falecka K. . Third Text 2023, 37(1), 44-60.
  • Falecka K. . African Arts 2022, 55(3), 38-53.

• Book Chapters

  • Falecka K. Unsunk Archives: The Resurfacing of Colonial Historical Records in Contemporary Art. In: Adamson, N; Taws, R, ed. A Companion to French Art. Wiley-Blackwell, 2026, pp.563-580.
  • Falecka K. . In: Halina Gajewska, Barry Keane, ed. Monika Weiss - Nirbhaya. Orońsko: Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko Press, 2021.

• Online Publications

  • Falecka K. . MoMA, New York: post: notes on art in a global context, 2025. Available at: .
  • Falecka K. . New York: apexart, 2021. Available at: .
  • Falecka K. . Berlin: TRAFO - Blog for Transregional Research, 2020. Available at: .

• Reviews

  • Falecka K. . Art History 2022, 45(1), 207-213.
  • Falecka K. . Journal of Arabian Studies 2017, 7(1), 119-121.