Anthony Downey

Dr Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture, with a specific focus on cultural practices in the Global South.

Anthony's teaching and research engages with the politics of global contemporary art practices; applied research and knowledge production in the arts and humanities; inclusion, fairness and governance in Artificial Intelligence (AI); the role of computer vision and machine learning in aerial warfare; and how practice-research can impact the field of human rights and international humanitarian law.

He is the Art and Design UoA32 Lead for the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2029) and, in his capacity as BCU lead, he recently completed a four-year £2.2 million Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC, 2021-2025) funded project, where his research focused on the expansion of educational and cultural provision for people with disabilities in Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Jordan. The latter award was preceded by an AHRC Development Award (2019-2021).

Anthony sits on the Cultural and Creative Industries Strategic Advisory Group (CCSAG) for the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA), and the advisory boards of the Centre for Drones and Culture (Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge University) and Disruption Network Institute (Berlin). He is a member of the Airspace Tribunal, an organisation that is working towards a United Nations submission to adopt a new human right to live without physical or psychological threat from above. In Septemebr 2026, the full dossier for the proposed new human right will be presented at the United Nations Human Rights Council 63rd Session in Geneva. 

Recent and forthcoming publications include Decolonizing Vision: Artificial Intelligence, Visual Cultures & the Future of Warfare (MIT Press, 2027); Trevor Paglen: Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations (Sternberg Press/MIT Press, 2024); Neocolonial Visions: Algorithmic Violence and Unmanned Aerial Systems (PostScriptUM no. 47, 2023); Khalil Rabah: Falling Forward—Works 1995- 2025 (Sharjah Art Foundation and Hatje Cantz, 2023), and Shona Illingworth: Topologies of Air (Sternberg Press and The Power Plant, 2021).