Migration as Imagination — with Writer and Journalist Ismail Einashe
Join Ismail Einashe, award-winning British-Somali writer and 2025/26 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow, for a deeply personal presentation exploring how art can reclaim the humanity of migrants and their stories, too often lost in the headlines of global displacement.
Drawing on his decade of reporting on migration, alongside artists including Mona Hatoum, Arshile Gorky, Tania Bruguera, and his recent book Strangers by Tate Publishing—as well as his own journey from Somalia to Britain—Einashe will recontextualize the migrant experience as an act of imagination, showing how art has the ability to challenge our dominant cultural narratives and bring us closer to the struggles and humanity of people we too easily categorize as ‘strangers’.
More About
Ismail Einashe
Ismail Einashe is an award-winning British-Somali journalist and author whose work on migration and refugee issues has appeared in numerous publications – including Foreign Policy, The Guardian, BBC News, The Nation, The Sunday Times and ArtReview. He is the author of “Strangers” (2023), a book by Tate Publishing that explores migration through the lens of art, and he co-edited “Lost in Media: Migrant Perspectives and the Public Sphere” (2019), a collection of critical essays examining how migrants are represented in European media. Einashe is a member of the editorial board of Tate Etc., the magazine of the Tate Galleries. He is also part of a team of journalists working on a cross-border journalism collaborative called Lost in Europe, which investigates the disappearance of child migrants.
SUPPORT
This program is presented in partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series, and Wallace House Center for Journalists.