Mariam Rosser-Owen is Curator in the Middle East Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London , where she has worked since 2002. She is a specialist in the arts of the medieval Islamic West, and has always been interested in questions of materials and making. This led her to develop a parallel interest in the contemporary crafts of the Middle East and North Africa. In 2015, she was awarded a New Collecting Award from the UK’s Art Fund to initiate a research and acquisition project for the V&A. This focused on contemporary craft from North Africa (Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco), as well as developing a methodology for the V&A’s institutional collecting in this area more broadly. As a result of this project, the V&A has been able to make significant acquisitions of craft from Morocco to Uzbekistan. In October 2018, she organised the landmark conference ‘Middle Eastern Crafts: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, and edited a special issue of the Journal of Modern Craft (13-1, March 2020) with a selection of the papers presented. She curated the exhibition Contemporary Ceramic Art from the Middle East, which took place in the V&A’s Ceramics Galleries from March to October 2021. Since then she has worked with contemporary ceramic artists from the Middle East on several projects that engage with the V&A’s historic collections.