b. Basra, Iraq, 1973

Sama Alshaibi’s image-based practice emerges from aftermath, where fragmentation and dispossession shape 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 the 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 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 land, water, and infrastructure, where colonial legacies, oil economies, and hydro-conflict register in the material world. Across these works, speculative gestures open onto disruption, survival, and forms of perception that exceed the visible.

Alshaibi’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the 55th Venice Biennale; the 13th Cairo International Biennale; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Maraya Art Centre; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and the Royal Ontario Museum. Her monographs include Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, published by Aperture in 2015, and Sama Alshaibi: Tell It to the River, published by Maraya Art Centre in 2023. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the Art Matters Betty Parsons Fellowship, an Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Visual Arts Award, and residencies at MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and Artpace. Born in Iraq to a Palestinian mother and Iraqi father, Alshaibi is a naturalized U.S. citizen and lives in Tucson, where she is Regents Professor of Art and Chair of Photography, Video, and Imaging at the University of Arizona.