Anna Marazuela Kim

Associate Fellow

International Advisor for Culture and Cities, Historian, Researcher and Critic

Anna Marazuela Kim is a cultural thinker, adviser and activist based in London.

Working across academia, the arts and urban revitalisation, with industry, NGOs and charities, Dr Kim is dedicated to fostering new approaches to civic and planetary thriving. Combining historical, philosophical and theoretical perspectives, she aims to bridge the gap between academia and wider audiences in the service of the public good. Currently she is leading the international publication of a book on Humanitarian Urban Design, which will showcase the remarkable NGO-led effort by the Türkiye Design Council to rebuild earthquake stricken Hatay province as a global exemplar in post-disaster recovery.

For over a decade, Dr Kim has been a member of institutes of advanced of study and multidisciplinary, cross-sector research groups in the US, Europe and the UK, advancing projects, publications and new paradigms on issues of critical contemporary concern, including iconoclasm and the culture wars; placemaking, civic agency and human thriving; and the ethical challenges of the image in the digital age.

Dr Kim was educated in intellectual history, then pursued graduate studies in philosophy and classics with Martha Nussbaum at Brown University, as Andrew Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. A subsequent PhD in the history of art and architecture examined histories and theories of iconoclasm across the East-West divide of Byzantium and Renaissance Italy. Re-interpreting Renaissance artworks as reflexive sites staging internalised forms of critique, or “creative iconoclasms, her work contributes a new view of the multiple reformations that shaped Europe and modernity, beyond the image-breaking of the North.

Dr. Kim’s expertise in the deep structures of images and our complex relations to them, from Plato to the present digital age, drawing together ethics and aesthetics, phenomenology, urban studies, anthropology, religion and technology, has led to fellowships at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Free University Berlin and UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL, where she was tapped as an adviser on the role of images in conflict by King’s College Department of War Studies, museums and forums internationally.

Since coming to the UK in 2015, Dr Kim has been endorsed by the British Academy as a world-leading researcher, invited as a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts and an affiliate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. A public-facing intellectual, she writes for diverse audiences, from NATO to FRIEZE, and advocates internationally for culture as a human right, most recently delivering a keynote at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo.

As the lead researcher for the US-based Thriving Cities Project/Lab for over a decade, Dr. Kim works as a consultant and advocate advancing frameworks and best practices to include artists and culture in development as vital to the ecology of cities and civic thriving. Her industry experience includes roles with Norman Foster at Foster + Partners, the Global Cultural Districts Network and Futurecity. Dr Kim has a long history of activism in conflict zones and supporting refugees, beginning in Nicaragua and the US (1980s), Ukraine (1990s) and Greece (2000s).

“Placemaking, Performance and Infrastructures of Belonging: The Role of Ritual Healing and Mass Cultural Gatherings in the Wake of Trauma.” Trauma-informed Placemaking, edited by C. Courage and A. McKeown, Routledge, 2024.

The Gallery: An Experiment in Cultural Democracy. Artichoke Trust, UK, 2023.

“On Making the Disappeared Reappear / Hrair Sarkissian.” Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize catalogue, Photographers Gallery, London, UK, Dec. 2023.

Art, Politics and the Rise and Fall of the Ideal City. Exhibition essay, Fondazione Marta Czok, Italy, Nov. 2023.

“Culture, Common Wealth and Civic Agency.” The Future of Cities, Local Government Association, UK, June 2022.

“Wall Text to Accompany Hamed Abdalla’s Lost or Escaped, for Exhibition: Whose Tradition?” Tate Liverpool, Mar. 2021.

“Can We Design for Culture? Paradigms and Provocations.” Built Environment, special issue Arts & the City, Summer 2020.

“Towards Beauty and a Civics of Place: Notes from the Thriving Cities Project.” Creative Placemaking: Research, Theory and Practice, edited by Cara Courage and Anita McKeown, Routledge, 2019.

Governance Models for Cultural Districts. Research brief commissioned by the Global Cultural Districts Network, with J. Doeser, Apr. 2018.

“Hamed Abdalla, The Mosaic Rooms, London.” Frieze Magazine (online), May 2018.

“A Fragile Generosity: Autumn, Art & Architecture in Venice.” TOAST Magazine/Arts & Culture (online), Sept. 2018.

“Interview with Cara Courage, Head of Tate Exchange.” TOAST Magazine/Arts & Culture (online), July 2018.

“Exhibition Review of Leonor Antunes + Rachel Whiteread.” TOAST Magazine/Arts & Culture (online), Jan. 2018.

“Overwriting the City: Graffiti, Crisis Politics, and the Image of Athens.” Defence Strategic Communications: Journal of NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, Fall 2017.

“Liane Lang: Civic Monuments and Spectres of the Past.” Garageland: Art, Culture, Ideas, issue 21, Spring 2017.

“Beauty as an Endowment of Thriving Cities.” Research brief, edited and authored with L. Merrill, C. Miller, and C. Yates, 2015, Thriving Cities Project, http://thrivingcities.com/endowments/beautiful.

“Re-enchantment and Iconoclasm in an Age of Images.” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture, Fall 2015.