Nausikaä El-Mecky

Nausikaä El-Mecky (PhD 2013, University of Cambridge) is a tenure-track researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, specialising in dangerous images. A dangerous image can be a medieval print, an (almost) forgotten monument or an Instagram post, as long as it raises the fear that this image could upset the moral, political or social order. What happens when an image bursts through the rarefied bubble of the art world and becomes a matter of life and death? In this context, she is most interested in the grey areas and unexpected subtleties in such a dramatic scenario: the destroyers of images who secretly love the artworks they attack; or the supposedly free society that subtly but mercilessly silences an inconvenient artist. Nausikaä El-Mecky is passionate about co-creation and immersive, unconventional approaches, and tries to combine the artistic with the academic whenever possible, using performance, participatory tools or animation to make art topics more accessible. This is also why she founded the Rebellious Teaching platform, which brings together educational boundary-pushers across disciplines and countries. She was a member of Die Junge Akademie (2017–22) and selected for GSO, Innosci Future Lab, Eutopia and European Crucible young academic leadership programmes. She was awarded the Maria Gräfin von Linden Prize for outstanding contributions to the humanities. 

"My aim is to found an Art in Peril center to safeguard artistic freedom through diverse, creative and transdisciplinary research, and to contribute to an international reframing of the Humanities, which are under attack for being speculative, open-ended, unpragmatic. Meanwhile, these unique qualities should be celebrated as a cornerstone of academia."

Nausikaä El-Mecky is a part of the Falling Walls Female Science Talents Intensive Track 2025.