Shahidha Bari (born 1980) is a British academic, critic and broadcaster in the fields of literature, philosophy and art.^[1][2] She is a professor at the University of the Arts London based at London College of Fashion.^[3] She is a host of the topical arts television programme Inside Culture on BBC Two, standing in for Mary Beard,^[4] one of the presenters of the BBC Radio 4 arts and ideas programme Free Thinking (previously titled Night Waves),^[5] and an occasional presenter of BBC Radio 4's Front Row.^[6]

She was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and lives in London. She is a Fellow of the Forum for Philosophy at the London School of Economics and an arts reviewer for a number of publications.^[7] She comes from a family of Bengali Muslims.

Her academic work moves between philosophy, literature and visual culture. Her book Dressed: The Philosophy of Clothes was published in 2019.^[8][9] Her latest book, Look Again: Fashion is a viewer's guide to fashion in the Tate Britain art collection.^[10]

In 2011, Bari was selected as one of ten BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers,^[11] a new project launched in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to communicate academic research to a wider audience. She is the winner of the 2014/15 Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize, for a "powerful and insightful" review of the National Theatre's Medea.^[12]

In print, her writing appears in The Financial Times,^[13] The Observer and the New Statesman. She is one of the regular books reviewers for The Guardian^[14] and The Times Literary Supplement,^[15] a contributor to Aeon^[16] and frieze^[17] and appears as a cultural critic on BBC TV.^[18] She has presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service.

Bari was on the board of the educational mentoring charity The Arts Emergency Service and currently is a trustee of the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Art Night.^[19] She was the chair of judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2019, ^[20] a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2020 ^[21] and on the judging panel for The Booker Prize 2022.^[22]