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Leading Ladies

4 Arab Artists To Know

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Meet these great creative minds from the region!

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Reem Fadda

As an independent curator and art historian, Reem Fadda is best known for managing exhibitions focusing on art and geopolitics in the Middle East. With over 10 years of experience in her field, she is also the Director of the Cultural Foundation, at Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism, having worked for several other organizations prior. For her work, she won the 8th Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2017.

Fadda was born in Kuwait in 1979, but is currently based in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In 2002, she obtained a B.A. in English Language and Literature from Birzeit University, in Ramallah, Palestine, and an M.A. in Curating from Goldsmiths College, London, in 2005. Through a Fulbright scholarship, in 2008, she went on to pursue a PhD at the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, U.S.A.

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Sarah Alagroobi

Sarah Alagroobi is a curator and educator, known for exploring notions of culture and identity of both Arab and Western contexts through post-colonial discourse. She is also the founder of The Letters Project, an online platform sharing letters from anonymous senders, which center on the anthropological and socio-political climate in the region.

Alagroobi was born to a mixed Syrian Emirati family in Brussels, Belgium in 1989. As a child, she and her family lived in Brussels, but also moved between Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While at high school, she moved back to Brussels prior to studying at American University of Rome, Italy in 2011, and American University of Sharjah, the UAE in 2013. In 2018, she would also obtain her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, in London.

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Zahrah Al Ghamdi

Another significant Saudi woman in art is Zahrah Al Ghamdi, who represented Saudi Arabia in 2019 at the Venice Biennale, and is most noted for her work as a land artist for over 10 years. Having faced a number of challenges in trying to establish herself as an artist in the early 2000s within the kingdom, she took off to Coventry in the UK to study. Now, in 2022, Al Ghamdi is rubbing shoulders with a number of internationally renowned artists, including Richard Long who is a prominent British land artist that inspired her PhD research. Both Al Ghamdi and Long exhibited their work at the 2022 Diriyah Biennale.

Al Ghamdi’s work explored deserted mud houses found in Al-Turaif, and created an installation that featured the use of dirt, leather, and rocks, representing a “dying history.” Zahrah often works on large scale projects that are usually inspired by the speedy changes taking place in the kingdom, especially in the environment and urban spaces, whilst also using elements of the traditional architecture of Al Baha, where she is from. She uses materials such as acacia trees, plaster, mud, cement, date containers, construction textiles, for texture and for structural depictions she uses fungal networks, building plans, rivers, and walls to create her large scale pieces of art.

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Shurooq Amin

Shurooq Amin is a Kuwaiti mixed-media interdisciplinary artist known for her works that encourage discussions on societal changes. As a painter and a poet, she has taken part in 15 solo exhibitions and 45 group exhibitions, and has published over 40 literary journals across the globe. She also became the first Kuwaiti woman to be interviewed by BBC's Stephen Sackur on HARD Talk, as well as being hosted on several BBC discussions both on television and radio.

Amin was born in 1967 to a Kuwaiti father and a Syrian mother. In 1988, she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in English literature at Kuwait University, before obtaining her Master of Arts (M.A.) in modern literature at Kent University, in the United Kingdom, the following year. In 2007, she also obtained a Doctor in Philosophy (PhD) in creative writing at Warnborough College.