Digital Horizons: Shaping The Understanding of Islamic Arts Through Technology

Noof Khonji is an Advisor to the Ministry of Culture’s General Department of Innovation (MOCX) and founder of ThinkFarm, a boutique consultancy specializing in innovation and cultural strategy. With over 20 years of experience across the GCC, she is a recognized expert in aligning culture, innovation, and strategic communication. In her advisory role, Khonji helps shape forward-thinking cultural strategies that drive sustainable growth and social impact, focusing on human-centric solutions that bridge culture with contemporary societal needs. She champions innovation as a tool to connect public and private sectors, brands, and communities through culturally relevant, measurable, and meaningful solutions. Khonji collaborates with organizations to create engaging experiences rooted in place, context, and impact. She holds a Master’s in Innovation Management from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, blending academic rigor with practical expertise. Her work continues to foster cultural innovation and strategic change for a more connected and sustainable future.

Dr. Sarah Savant is a Professor of History and founding director of the Aga Khan University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. She was born and raised in the United States (Washington DC, Milwaukee, and Chicago). She attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service as an undergraduate, and then the University of Chicago for her MA in History of Religion. She earned her PhD from Harvard with a Dissertation co-chaired by Religion and History. Her PhD Dissertation was entitled Finding Our Place in the Past: Genealogy and Ethnicity in Islam and won the Foundation for Iranian Studies 2006 Dissertation Prize. Since 2007, she has worked at the AKU’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, and since 2019, she has been a member of its senior management team. Her Digital Humanities project work focuses on building a corpus of Arabic-script texts (now comprising over 2 billion words, mostly in Arabic, but also Persian and Urdu) and leading work on text reuse detection and citation analysis (including with AI). Her projects have included, as PI, the ERC- and Qatar National Library-funded KITAB project, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI), as co-PI with Matthew Miller and Maxim Romanov.

Dr. Amy Landau is Director of Education and Interpretation at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in Islamic Art and Archaeology from the University of Oxford. At the Fowler, Dr. Landau oversees gallery interpretation, digital learning, and programming for K–12 audiences, university students, and the public. She established the museum’s digital learning program and directs Vital Matters: Art, Devotion, and Practice, a major initiative that reimagines the interpretation of religious and devotional materials through the lens of lived religion. She also co-founded Visual and Sonic Landscapes of Muslims of Los Angeles, a community-engaged platform supporting UCLA’s Global Islam course.