Sada Mire

Sada Mire is a Swedish-Somali archaeologist, art historian and presenter who currently serves as assistant professor at the faculty of archeology, Leiden University. She is a public intellectual and heritage activist who has argued that cultural heritage is a basic human need in her 2014 TEDxEuston talk. In 2017, Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts selected Mire as one of their 30 international thinkers and writers. She became the Director of Antiquities pf Somaliland in 2007. Raised in the Somali capital of Mogadishu Mire fled the country at the start of the civil war at the age of 15. She then traveled to Sweden seeking asylum. She is educated at Lund University and have a PhD from the University College of London in UK (2009). She has since returned to the Horn of Africa working as an archaeologist.