Sary Zananiri is a cultural practitioner and theorist.  He is interested in the ways in which visual culture can shed light on modernist transformations of identity categories such as gender, national and religious identification, communalism and class, particularly in the modern Middle East.  Much of his work is focused on visual culture and practice-led research as vehicle for the exploration of historical themes and the impacts of their transnational circulation.

Zananiri was a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Dutch Research Council (NWO) VIDI project CrossRoads: European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine 1918-1948: A Connected History and the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO) at Leiden University, a Visiting Scholar at Dar al Kalima in Bethlehem, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens and a heritage consultant with the Saudi Arabian Heritage Commission.

Recent exhibitions include the Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (2023), University of Groningen Library (2023), INALCO, Paris (June-July 2022), the Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival, Tunis (September 2022), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (December 2021-February 2022), the National Glass Museum, Wagga Wagga (July-November 2021), Rijksmuseum Oudheden, Leiden (May-October 2020) and Der Haus Der Kunst der Welt for ALMS, Berlin (June 2019).

He is currently writing a monograph, Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (IB Tauris, forthcoming) looking at nationalist constructions of religion and masculinity in 1920s Palestine. He has co-edited two volumes: Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (Brill, 2021) and European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine: Between Contention and Connection (Palgrave McMillan, 2021).  A third edited volume Revisiting Palestine Illustrated (Amsterdam University Press) is due out in 2025.  He has written extensively on Palestinian and Eastern Mediterranean visual culture, particularly photography and craft exports.