Dr. Barouti is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Art History, Theory, and Criticism department and co-founder of Los Angeles-based Four Arches Studio. In 2022 she earned her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Her project, “A Critical Moroccan Chronology: The National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan Since 1946” was awarded Boston University’s Keith N. Morgan Dissertation Prize for the 2021-2022 academic year and her third chapter was the recipient of AMCA’s Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art. Her work has been supported by numerous grants including a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship. Dr. Barouti is regularly invited to present her original research at institutions worldwide, including Harvard University, Brandeis University, NYU-Abu Dhabi, and SOAS University of London. Working across five languages, Dr. Barouti has done curatorial work internationally at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, MFA Boston, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2019, she was part of the CCL Mellon Foundation Seminar in Curatorial Practice. In 2022, she was a Brooks International Fellow at Tate Modern’s curatorial department and a resident at the Delfina Foundation. In 2024 she participated in the Momus Art Journalism residency. Her writing can be found in Frieze, Hyperallergic, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles. Her book Resisting from Morocco’s Margins: Ahmed Amrani’s Protesta, 1969 is forthcoming with Anthem Press.
Morocco’s first fine arts school, L’Institut national des beaux-arts (The National Institute of Fine Arts; hereafter INBA), is located in Tetouan—a city in the northern region known as the Rif (fig. 1). The school was founded in 1946 by the Spanish colonial government as La Escuela preparatoria de bellas artes (The Preparatory School of Fine…
