About the Curator

Najam Ul Assar is one of the leading curatorial voices shaping South Asian digital art today. As the founder and curator of the South Asian Digital Arts Archive (SADA), he has positioned the region’s digital practices firmly within global conversations on technology, power, memory, and cultural futures. His work is known for centring artists’ voices, challenging extractive archival models, and reframing South Asia not as a peripheral digital space, but as a site of critical innovation and cultural leadership.

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Najam is currently a PhD candidate in Digital Arts and Humanities at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan), where his doctoral research advances SADA as a living, evolving archive—one that experiments with ethical archiving, multilingual access, and postcolonial approaches to digital heritage. Bridging scholarship and practice, his curatorial method is both rigorous and unapologetically contemporary.

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He is also the founding curator of the Lahore Digital Arts Festival, widely recognized as one of South Asia’s most influential platforms for digital art, AI, immersive media, and critical technology discourse. Beyond the art world, Najam has worked internationally with cultural institutions and global organizations, bringing a rare strategic lens that connects digital culture, policy, and public engagement.

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Looking forward, his ambition is to scale SADA into a global reference point for South Asian digital art—expanding through future volumes, exhibitions, commissions, and open digital tools—cementing the region’s artists not just within archives, but at the centre of how South Asian digital futures are imagined worldwide.