Ph.D. in Media and Communication from the Art Philosophy and Critical Thought Department of the European Graduate School Switzerland
M.A. in Media Studies (Electronic Media), Notre Dame University, Lebanon
B.A. in Graphic Design, Notre Dame University, Lebanon

Dr. Chahid Akoury joined LAU in Fall 2015 as an Assistant Professor in Art and Design and is now Associate Professor. He teaches foundation-year studios and graphic design courses. A former Chair of the Department of Art and Design, he is actively engaged in research, and his writing has been published in international journals on Art and Design. His scholarship brings phenomenology, posthuman aesthetics, and visual culture to bear on questions of material agency, design education, and emerging technologies. 

Research Interests

His work is organized around one question: how do perception, matter, and technology co-constitute aesthetic experience? It develops through three connected strands.

Phenomenology and the aesthetics of presence. Dr. Akoury’s central contribution is a phenomenological account of how experience is felt, perceived, and shared. His article “A Phenomenological Ground for Relational Perception” (Visual Studies, 2022) grounds perception in relation rather than in an isolated subject. “Immersive Experiences as the Condition of Possibility for Affective Spacing” (Continuum, 2020) examines how immersive environments open spaces of affect. “Beirut: Alternative Chronotopes for an Aesthetic Experience of Presence” (Design and Culture) reads the city as a site of layered and contested time. Together these texts establish a theory of visual culture as something enacted and lived rather than simply displayed.

Material agency and design as performance. In “Perceptive Destabilizations: Design as Incessant Performance” (International Journal of Design Education, 2018), design is understood as an ongoing, unsettled performance rather than a fixed outcome. His most cited article, “Apprehending the Creative Process through Drawing in the Foundation Design Studio” (International Journal of Art & Design Education, 2020), attends to the agency of the drawn mark, the material, and the studio in shaping creative thought. This strand carries his theoretical work into pedagogy: how students come to understand, do, and become designers through objects, materials, and research, from the foundation year onward.

Posthuman aesthetics and emerging technologies. His most recent work extends these concerns to artificial intelligence and generative tools. Drawing on phenomenology and posthuman thought, he examines intention, authorship, and aesthetic judgment when agency is distributed among humans, materials, and machines, a problem of growing international importance for art and design.

Some of his research publications are listed on these websites:

• ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1168-6234

Select Publications

Akoury, C. (2026). Beirut: Alternative chronotopes for an aesthetic experience of presence. Design and Culture, 18(1), 33-53.

Akoury, C. (2022). A phenomenological ground for relational perception. Visual Studies, 37(5), 681-692.

Akoury, C. (2020). Apprehending the creative process through drawing in the foundation design studio. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 39(1), 113-125.

Akoury, C. (2020). Immersive experiences as the condition of possibility for affective spacing. Continuum, 34(6), 955-963.

Akoury, C. (2018). Perceptive destabilizations: Design as incessant performance. The International Journal of Design Education, 12(3), 47.

Akoury, C. (2014). Creative deactualization. Atropos Press. ISBN 1940813220.