Migration as Imagination
Join Ismail Einashe, award-winning British-Somali writer and 2025 – 2026 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 a decade of reporting on migration, his work 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 categorise as “strangers.”
Ismail Einashe is an award-winning 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, The New York Times, NPR, Frieze, 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 in the UK. 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.
Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.
