(b. 1973, Iraq) 

Sama Alshaibi works across image and installation, combining emerging technologies with historic processes to explore how the medium itself shapes what is seen, obscured, or remembered. Moving between photography, video, LiDAR scanning, archives, photogravure, and albumen printing, her projects highlight the ways images register both presence and disappearance, fact and speculation.

Alshaibi’s early practice positions her body as a site of performance, interrogating the social and gendered effects of migration and conflict. Her work complicates the visual coding of the Arab female figure within the image history of the Middle East and North Africa. Alshaibi’s sculptural installations function as counter-memorials to forced exile.

Her work has been widely exhibited, including in 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 Sand Rushes In in 2015.

Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, Sama Alshaibi is based in the United States, where she serves as a Regents Professor of Photography, Video, and Imaging at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She holds a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Media Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder.