Susan Ossman trained as an anthropologist, artist, and historian who has researched and worked in North Africa, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. She is known for her creative research design and pioneering associations of art and scholarship, which have led her to propose critical new perspectives on media, mobility, aesthetics, globalization, gender, environment, and politics. She has led numerous international collective programs, notably The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop (MMTW), a collective of migrant artists and scholars that explores questions of migration with diverse publics in sites that range from public plazas to museums like the Hermitage-Amsterdam and tourist sites like the Berlin Wall Memorial.

Ossman writes about her path as an artist-scholar in her latest book, Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork, a Memoir of Anthropology and Art (Routeldge 2021). Her previous books include Picturing Casablanca, Portraits of Power in a Modern City (California 1994), Three Faces of Beauty, Casablanca, Paris, Cairo ( Duke 2002), and Moving Matters, Paths of Serial Migration (Stanford 2013). She has exhibited and performed her work in galleries, museums, and public spaces in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Tunisia, the UK, and the USA.