Saadia Mirza

Saadia Mirza is an anthropologist and artist whose research examines perceptions of geological processes and environmental change through the use of sensing systems, climate modelling, and landscape simulation. Her work has been published in the Visual Anthropology Review, NatureCulture, Diseña, and Routledge’s Archaeological Sensibilities volume as well as other journals that deal with sensory and ethnographic knowledge. As an anthropologist, her work also incorporates expressive works such as sound and video installations as part of a body of ethnographic media, alongside published ethnographic works and texts. They highlight the importance of sound, image and tactility for ethnographic transmission, communication and dissemination in embodied and sensory formats. Her published works thus exist in the public domain alongside their expressive and artistic corollaries in the form of sound and video installations which have been exhibited internationally at biennales and art festivals in Austria, China, France, Germany, Poland, Sri Lanka and South Korea. She has published and taught across the fields of anthropology, architecture, media studies, and research-creation across France, Pakistan, and the USA. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2024), and a Master’s in Design Studies from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (2014). At metaLAB Basel, she conducts an SNF postdoc project (2026-2028) on the anthropology of sensing technologies and cryosphere representation, contributing to Basel’s focus on human-planetary health through multimodal fieldwork across glacial landscapes in the Swiss Alps, Central Asia, and Antarctica.