b. Basra, Iraq, 1973

Sama Alshaibi’s image-based practice emerges from aftermath, where fragmentation and dispossession are the conditions of political conflict and forced migration. Working with images, data, fieldwork, and archives, she examines how large systems enter material and social life and how place, identity, and ideology are staged and contested.

In her recent projects, Alshaibi renders Baghdad as a palimpsest. Layers of modernization, war, and restructuring compress multiple temporalities into the ancient city. Return—grounded by Alshaibi’s position as both exiled and returnee—exposes this misalignment between memory, form, and experience. What remains is a constellation of peripheral evidence, continually improvised and reassembled, where voids carry the weight of intangible residue.

Alshaibi also works with her own body as both site and subject, building photographic constructions that stage the figure among props and provisional settings. These powerful, feminized portrayals push back against a Western visual legacy that has long instrumentalized images of Middle Eastern and North African women as a pretext for subjection, insisting on gender as an active, resistant force. Her practice also extends to the environment. Across her projects, land, water, and infrastructure register the convergence of colonial legacies, oil economies, and hydro-conflict. Speculative gestures open thresholds between the material world and more-than-perceivable realms, imagining alternative orders of disruption and survival.

Sama Alshaibi’s work has been widely exhibited, including at the 55th Venice Biennale, the 13th Cairo International Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Crystal Bridges Museum of Art (State of the Art 2020), and the Barjeel Foundation (UAE). Aperture Foundation published her monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, in 2015. Alshaibi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography (2021), the Art Matters Betty Parsons Fellowship (2023), the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Visual Arts Award (2017), and residencies at MacDowell (2025), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (2024), and Artpace (2019). Born in Iraq to a Palestinian mother and Iraqi father, and now a naturalized US citizen, Alshaibi resides in Tucson, where she is Regents Professor of Art and the Chair of the Photography, Video, and Imaging program at the University of Arizona.