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Pansee Abou El Atta is an Egyptian-Canadian scholar, visual artist, curator currently based in the Netherlands. Through both research and art practice, her work examines receptions of Ancient Egypt from the eighteenth century through the present, using Critical Museology and decolonial methodologies to envision liberatory possibilities for archives and collections.

As an artist-research fellow in the NWA-funded Pressing Matter research project, she investigated the potentialities of ‘colonial objects’ to support societal reconciliation with the colonial past. As part of this project, her large-scale interactive art installation is exhibited as part of a group exhibition at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam titled 'Unfinished Pasts: return, keep, or…?'

She is a former research fellow as part of Inherit, a BMBF-funded Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at the Humboldt University of Berlin, examining historical, contemporary and future transformations in heritage. Through this fellowship, her research investigated the way the concept of Ḥurma (Arabic: autonomy, dignity, privacy, honour) may be implemented to more ethically re-consider the collection, exhibition, and study of Ancient Egyptian mummified human remains.

She is a current visiting fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East at Leiden University, undertaking an artistic-research project titled “What can Ancient Egyptian mummies tell us about Dutch collection histories?” examining museological receptions and taxonomies of human remains in museum collections.