Kit Messham-Muir is Professor of Art at the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University, in Perth Western Australia. His expertise is in contemporary art and visual culture with a particular focus on conflicts of various kinds, including political violence, terror and war. Since the 1990s, his work has drawn upon and critiqued aspects of affect and trauma theory in the humanities, particularly in art theory, and he has investigated contemporary war art in Australia and internationally, Holocaust museums and memorials and the politics and aesthetics of ‘culture war’.

His books include The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2021), both co-authored with A/Prof Uroš Čvoro, and Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Thames & Hudson, 2015). Prof Messham-Muir is the lead editor on The Politics of Artists in War Zones: Art in Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Art After War and Genocide: Curating, Reconstructing and Imagining (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2027).

Professor Messham-Muir is Lead Chief Investigator on Art of Peace: New perspectives in visual art on peacekeeping from the 1990s, an Australian Research Council Linkage project in partnership with the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the National Trust of NSW. The overall project budget is $1,884,136, with partner organisations contributing $576,518 in cash and in-kind, and with ARC funding of $435,984. Art of Peace will centre different perspectives in the art that addresses peacekeeping, from artists in former peacekeeping conflict zones of the 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and Timor-Leste. 

In 2025, he co-curated Art of Peace: Art After War at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, a major international exhibition of post-conflict contemporary art by nine artists from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and Timor-Leste. The project received Curtin University's 2025 Research Team of the Year Award and the 2026 Faculty of Humanities Initiating and Sustaining Research Award.  

Professor Messham-Muir holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of New South Wales (2000). His doctoral thesis examined the role of affect in political conflicts surrounding contemporary art in the 1990s. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art Honours Class 1 from Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney (1996), majoring in the Painting Studio.  

Since 1997, Prof Messham-Muir has taught art history at universities in Australia and Hong Kong and won multiple awards for teaching. Prof Messham-Muir has supervised to completion 21 PhD and 6 Masters, and currently supervises 5 PhDs at Curtin University. He publishes in peer-reviewed and popular press (Artforum, Art & Australia, The Conversation) and since 2012 has directed the StudioCrasher online video project, which has received over 130,000 views.