Experience Highlights

Publications

• Global Art Daily E-Magazine
  • “Individual Stories, Common Threads: Hayat Osamah’s Soft Gates at the Islamic Arts Biennale 2025.” 20 Feb. 2025.
  • “Salwa Mikdadi Reflects on the Opening of NYU Abu Dhabi’s Arab Center for the Study of Art.” 1 Oct. 2021.
  • “Sharjah Art Foundation Jets Ahead on the Flying Saucer.” 9 Dec. 2020.
• Millennial Gulf Blog (Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington)
  • “And All That Is In Between: Centering Community at the Islamic Arts Biennale.” 19 Mar. 2025.
  • “‘Gentle Porosities:’ Mashael Alsaie’s First Solo Show Urges a Tenderness Toward the Land.” 20 Nov. 2024.
  • “Hand Into the Past: Omani Artist Kawthar Al Harthi’s Contemplative Creative Practice.” 30 Sept. 2024.
  • “Between Collective Memory and Contemporary Media: AI in Daniah Alsaleh’s Creative Practice.” 26 Jun. 2024.
  • “Urban Imaginaries and Lived Realities in “The Idealised City”.” 4 Jun. 2024.
  • “Gulf Artists Make a Splash at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale.” 6 May 2024.
  • “Education in Focus: Speculative Horizons’ Photography Project in Kuwait.” 15 Apr. 2024.
  • “Art Dubai’s “Encounters” Showcases “Village Vibe” of Emirati Artists.” 19 Mar. 2024.
  • “Wusum Gallery Provides a Fresh Perspective on Doha’s Art Scene.” 12 Feb. 2024.
  • “Nature’s Palette: Mohammad Alfaraj’s Art Captures the Spirit of Al-Ahsa.” 22 Jan. 2024.
  • “Thinking Green in the Gulf: Creative Approaches to the Climate Crisis.” 11 Dec. 2023.
  • “Head in the Clouds or Outer Space, Pop Icon RexChouk Is Relatable and Hilarious.” 3 Oct. 2023.
  • “SARAI Gallery Connects Emerging Iranian Artists With the World.” 5 Sept. 2023.
  • “Meaning in Material: Amani AlThuwaini’s Artistic Mantra.” 21 Aug. 2023.
  • “Climate Action, Water Scarcity, and Nostalgia: Bahrain at the Venice Architecture Biennale.” 20 Jun. 2023.
  • “Islamic Arts Biennale: Saudi Arabia Puts a Spotlight on Global Islamic Art.” 10 Apr. 2023.
  • “Charting a Path for Cycling the Arab World.” 6 Mar. 2023.
  • “Home of Khaleeji Hip Hop and R&B: Bahrain in the Gulf Music Scene.” 5 Dec. 2022.
  • “Sandstorm Comics: Building a Local Comic Book Industry.” 14 Nov. 2022.
  • “Constructing Mars in Kuwait: Young Kuwaitis Lead on Space Sector Development.” 24 Oct. 2022.
  • “Probing Social Pressures with Textiles and Ice Cream.” 11 Oct. 2022.
  • “Qatar’s World Cup and Public Art: Expanding the Field of Dialogue.” 26 Sept. 2022.
  • “The Knot: Putting Young Emiratis at the Forefront of Memory Preservation and Storytelling.” 18 Jul. 2022.
  • “Oman Debuts at the 59th Venice Biennale with ‘Destined Imaginaries.” 27 Jun. 2022.
  • “Padel Picks Up: The World’s Fastest Growing Sport Finds a Home in the Gulf.” 31 May 2022.
  • “Creating Space and Access: Literary Communities and Collectives in the UAE.” 18 Apr. 2022.
  • “Asim Abdulaziz: Pushing Boundaries Through Experimental Film in Yemen.” 21 Mar. 2022.
  • “Abdulla BinHindi: The Rise of NFT Art in the Gulf.” 31 Jan. 2022.
  • “Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale: A New Platform for Saudi Artists on the World Stage.” 9 Dec. 2021.
  • “IN NARRATIVE: Exploring Urban Gulf Spaces Through Fiction.” 12 Oct. 2021.
  • “Expo 2020 Dubai: By and For UAE Youth.” 27 Sept. 2021.
• QatarAmerica Institute for Culture, Washington, DC
  • “Public Art Institutions and Murals Introduce World Cup Fans to Qatar’s Art and Culture.” Dec. 2022.
• Fiker Institute, Dubai
  • “Creating Spaces for West African Art in the UAE: Exhibitions, Institutions, and Individuals.” Feb. 2022.
• Infrastructures of the Self in Late Ottoman Iraq
  • Assisted Camille Cole, Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, with data organizing and mapping in her short article entitled, “Infrastructures of the Self in Late Ottoman Iraq” in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 17.05.2021, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/28757.
• OpenGulf Blog Post
  • “Wādi Tāyīn: Then and Now.” OpenGulf: Blogs, 23 July 2020.
• Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, 2019: Undergraduate Research Workshop Abstract and Poster
  • “Artistic Taste-Making at the Sharjah Biennial.” Review of Middle East Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, 21 Oct. 2020, pp. 125–126., doi:10.1017/rms.2020.8.

Presentations & Interviews

• The Future Is Not a Grave Workshop at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute
  Co-curated, with Mustafa Thaer, a pop-up exhibition entitled Relics of Tomorrow and spoke in a roundtable discussion in the “Curating the Future” public program series, organized as part of The Future Is Not a Grave, on November 10, 2025. Exhibition description:
  The show gathers artists who reimagine contemporary technologies as future artifacts: Talal Al Najjar’s Future Artifacts anchors a collection that treats the digital present as archaeology. Works by Hayfa Algwaiz, Basmah Felemban, Roy Dest, and Ashay Bhave explore intimacy, faith, ecology, and identity through digital media, revealing how the traces of our networks and screens may one day become relics of our own imagined futures.
• Gulf Research Meeting 2025 at Cambridge University
  Presented a paper entitled “Gulf Futurism in the Visual Arts: A New Optimism?” with AGSI Senior Resident Scholar Kristin Diwan under the GCC Futurescapes: Past and Present workshop. The conference took place from July 22-24, 2025.
• OpenGulf: Creating Open Historical Data about the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf
  Participated in two sessions, Introducing the Lorimer Dataset and Research with and through the Lorimer Dataset, at the Stanford University Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis’ OpenGulf: Creating Open Historical Data about the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf symposium on May 23, 2025.
• Culture Summit Abu Dhabi 2025
  Moderated artist panel featuring Basmah Felemban and Saad Alsharrah, curated with the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington DC, on April 29, 2025.
  Centered around historical and contemporary ethno-cartographic practices, this panel explores how Gulf artists trace alternative histories of the world and the universe. From the celestial to the subaqueous, they document stories of movement and migration through a multispecies lens, encompassing pearls, catfish, soil, and the cosmos. In doing so, they provide an understanding of the world that breaks from anthropocentric narratives and considers nonhuman subjectivities using photography, video, drawing, and sculpture.
• NYU Abu Dhabi First Year Writing Seminar Research Symposium
  Gave keynote address to First Year Writing Seminar students at NYU Abu Dhabi on the possibilities of pursuing a career in writing and research on April 11, 2025.
• Building Digital Humanities Symposium 2022
  Presentation on career pathways in the Digital Humanities, alongside Dr. David Wrisley, for the Imagining Digital Humanities Friendly Careers panel session on November 11, 2022.
• Stanford University Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis
  Contributed to presentation entitled “Beyond the National Archive: Digital Futures for Gulf Studies” given by Dr. Nora Barakat and Dr. David Wrisley on October 18, 2022.
• Right-to-Left Conference at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute
  Presentation entitled Shaping Old Sharjah: A Geospatial Analysis of Biennial Art Exhibitions in Old Sharjah from 2003–2019 at the Right-to-Left conference on June 8, 2021. Participated in the Right-to-Left and Forms of Distance panel session with 3 other scholars.
• OpenGulf Summer 2021 Research Term
  Workshop entitled OpenGulf Summer 2021: Using Google Sheets Tutorial to help researchers and students new to the Digital Humanities with using Google Sheets as a data analysis tool.
• OpenGulf Historical Texts Analysis Gulf-a-thon
  Tutorial created for researchers learning to use the GeoNames database for geospatial research, created for OpenGulf’s March 8, 2021 virtual Gulf-a-thon event (view shorter tutorial here).
• NYUAD Winter Institute in Digital Humanities at NYC Digital Humanities Week Workshop
  Workshop entitled Using Google Sheets to Create, Organize, and Explore Your Humanities Data (available for download on Zenodo) geared towards Humanities practitioners aiming to employ digital tools in their research; given on February 11, 2021.
• Middle East Librarians Association Annual Conference 2020 Presentation
  Presentation entitled Team-Based Manipulation of Digitally Available Texts in a Remote Environment: Notes on Research and Pedagogy on Social Justice/Decolonizing the Library panel (with Dr. David Wrisley, Dr. Nora Barakat, and Gurgen Tadevosyan) on October 21, 2020.
• Data and Human Space Expert Chat with Dr. David Wrisley & Nada Ammagui
  Interview for NYU Abu Dhabi core course, Data and Human Space, taught by Professor David Wrisley, Fall 2020.

Experience Highlights

• Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE
  Curatorial Assistant
• Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, Washington, D.C., USA
  Associate in Arts, Culture, and Social Trends
  Research Associate (Politics, Society & Culture)
• Arts & Humanities Department, NYU Abu Dhabi, UAE
  Postgraduate Research Fellow
• OpenGulf Research Project, NYU Abu Dhabi, UAE
  Postgraduate Research Assistant
• Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi, UAE
  Education and Outreach Intern
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA
  Islamic Art Department Intern