Dr Ladan Akbarnia is Head of Curatorial and Professor of Islamic World Collections at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. She previously worked as Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) and as Curator and Assistant Keeper for the Islamic Collections at The British Museum. At SDMA, she organized the major touring exhibition, Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World (September 2024–June 2025). Dr Akbarnia  previously served as Executive Director at the Iran Heritage Foundation in London and Associate Curator of Islamic Art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, where she was responsible for the 2009 reinstallation of the Islamic gallery and the exhibition Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam. Additionally, she was a consultant for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Museum Support Unit in Switzerland and taught Islamic art history at Smith College and Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She has published extensively on a variety of topics, including cross-cultural transmissions between Iran and East Asia, Sufism and Islamic art, contemporary Middle Eastern art and methodologies of museum display.