8 Middle Eastern Female Artists To Know
Abeer Seikaly
Abeer Seikaly is a Jordanian-Palestinian interdisciplinary thinker and maker, who works across architecture, design, fine art, and cultural production. She founded Studio Abeer Seikaly in Amman, Jordan, in 2010, and today, her practice is grounded in ‘acts of memory’: journalling, documenting, archiving and collecting. Drawing inspiration from traditional knowledge of her Arab homeland, Abeer focuses on indigenous Bedouin practices for which she travels to Jordan’s Badia (desert), where she engages in textile weaving and tent making. Her works have been exhibited at many institutions around the world, including America and Europe.
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Hayv Kahraman
Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1981, now lives and works in LA. Known for her multifaceted practice, which encompasses painting, performance, and sculpture, her work addresses radicalised gender and body politics, migrant consciousness, and the marginal spaces of diasporic life, drawing from her personal history as an Iraqi migrant first to Europe and then the US. In her canvases, Kahraman shows female figures that she describes as extensions of her own body but, rather than seeing these women as self-portraits, Kahraman views the figures as embodiments of a collective experience. The struggle of displacement is further amplified through the disfigurement and violation that often afflicts the women shown. Kahraman associates her subjects’ violent detachment from their limbs as a metaphor of the psyche of refugees and their sense of detachment from the homelands they have left behind.
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Arghavan Khosravi
Born in Shahr-e Kord, Iran, Arghavan Khosravi now lives and works in Stamford, Connecticut. In her work, Arghavan explores the aesthetics of ancient Persian miniature paintings, which were originally used to illustrate folklore texts. Typically, the only women they portray have a subservient role, and through her work, Khosravi takes a look at how the value system transmitted by these depictions continues to shape Iranian gender politics today. Female bodies are often shown as being shackled or with their mouths sewn shut. One of the most striking characteristics of Khosravi’s paintings is their multi-dimensionality – constructed from layers of cut and painted wooden panels, they offer a constantly shifting perceptual experience.
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Naila Marei Studio
Naila Marei is an emerging Egyptian artist, who psychologically and philosophically analyses herself and her environment to represent topics she feels most strongly about through controversial depiction. She held her first exhibition at 18 in Cairo, Egypt, then moved to Montreal, Canada to study Fine Arts and Interior Design. Naila is inspired by everything around her, absorbing shape, colour, texture and dimensions to subconsciously bring them out in her artwork. What inspires Naila are the subjects she’s passionate about – usually society, societal norms, societal pressures and things she doesn’t believe in. By bringing forward topics she thinks should be discussed, Naila hopes her work will spark healthy conversation about things that aren’t talked about enough.
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Lalla A. Essaydi
Lalla A. Essaydi grew up in Morocco and now lives in the US, where she attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/TUFTS University. Beyond the States, her work has been exhibited internationally including in Syria, Ireland, England, France, the Netherlands, Sharjah, the UAE., and Japan. It’s also been represented in a number of collections, including the Williams College Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Fries Museum and The Kodak Museum of Art. Her art, which often combines Islamic calligraphy with representations of the female body, addresses the complex reality of Arab female identity from the unique perspective of personal experience. In much of her work, she returns to her Moroccan girlhood, looking back on it as an adult woman caught somewhere between past and present, and as an artist, exploring the language in which to communicate from this uncertain space. Her paintings often appropriate Orientalist imagery from the Western painting tradition, thereby inviting viewers to reconsider the Orientalist mythology. She works in numerous media, including painting, video, film, installation, and analogue photography.
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Maitha Abdalla
Emirati multi-disciplinary artist, Maitha Abdalla, combines film, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing and performance. She also harnesses the performative qualities of the theatre to tackle themes that range from folklore and mythology to gender, social conditioning and psychology. For the artist, the theatre is a space where she confronts and subverts that which she has encountered in her social world, including her imagination, memories and fantasies at an objective distance. Full of drama and melancholy, her imaginative scenes shift between abstraction and representation. As part of an ongoing investigation into the self, Maitha constructs characters that embody a distinct element of her persona often constrained within tight domestic spaces that expose their vulnerability. Maitha employs a bodily approach to painting, often applying dense layers of oil and acrylic paint with her fingertips and tracing around her own figure with smears of charcoal.
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Yasmina Hilal
Yasmina Hilal is a Lebanese fashion/mixed media photographer and experimental filmmaker. Her methods concentrate on collaging different mediums including non-conventional objects, and her evolving style, marked by her innovative use of materials and techniques, continues to contribute meaningfully to contemporary art. Hilal’s mother, Natalie Mokadem, a renowned photographer and collage artist in the 1990s, gave Yasmina her first camera, a Canon ae1, at the age of 15. Now, her body of work – profoundly shaped by her Lebanese-American heritage and familial influences in fashion and photography – culminates in a unique blend of tactile collage art and film photography. Her work includes themes of motherhood, daughterhood, and cultural identity, which reflects both her personal experiences but also positions her as a significant figure among a new generation of Lebanese women artists.
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Manala AlDowayan
Manal AlDowayan is one of Saudi Arabia’s most significant contemporary artists working internationally – she represented Saudi Arabia at the Venice Biennale 2024. Her work, which spans various mediums including photography, sound and sculpture, probes traditions, collective memories, and the status of women. Long invested in interrogating the gender-biased customs that impact the condition of women in Saudi Arabia, AlDowayan is a sensitive yet critical witness to the major and subtle changes engulfing the Kingdom. AlDowayan’s practice navigates a territory where the personal and the political overlap and her work springs from lived experiences. Yet her pieces are recognised as consistently invigorating, sparking identification and engagement, particularly among women around the world.
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