Oskár Čepan

Jury member of Oskár Čepan Award 2026 Dr. Noit Banai (PhD, Columbia University) is Professor of Diaspora Aesthetics at the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. An art historian and critic specializing in modern and contemporary art, her work examines migration, exile, diaspora, border regimes, and statelessness, with particular attention to the intersections of diaspora and science/speculative fiction as frameworks for imagining belonging beyond the nation-state. Her current book project, Stateless: Artistic Life in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, 1933–1953, explores how Jewish refugees in East and Southeast Asia, alongside Baghdadi, Persian, and Russian stateless communities and other displaced populations, visually and materially negotiated conditions of statelessness. She is the author of Yves Klein (Reaktion 2014), Being a Border (Paper Visual Arts, 2021) and has published in Third Text, Stedelijk Studies, Public Culture, Performing Arts Journal, Filozovski Vestnik, and the Journal of Jewish Latin American Studies. She previously served as assistant editor of RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics and is a regular contributor to Artforum International.