About

I have held senior positions in Cairo, Manama, Jeddah, and Riyadh, and have collaborated with institutions from Amsterdam to NYC, and from Hamburg to Johannesburg. My portfolio ranges from non-profit to commercial, from gallery expansion in Saudi Arabia to heritage-driven programming in AlUla and UNESCO-sites in Egypt, always placing art in dialog with its cultural context.

Curatorial Approach

Curating, for me, is a form of storytelling, one rooted in context, collaboration, and critical dialog. Each project is a conversation among artworks, artists, audiences, and the institutional/ geographic/ historic frameworks in which they meet. My curatorial approach also emphasizes place-making: from activating heritage architecture to shaping encounters in exhibition spaces that resonate across borders.

Throughout my nearly two decades of work between regions, I have sought to foster artistic connections and transnational exchanges. I am committed to challenging inherited frameworks and shifting away from Western-centric narratives, as well as creating platforms where a plurality of voices can surface. Whether working with emerging or established artists and institutions, my aim is to build projects that hold space for complexity, forge unexpected affinities, and reimagine how culture circulates today.

I am also delighted that my alma mater SOAS, University of London, invited me to share these perspectives as lecturer of principles of curation for their MA in Museum Studies, a new program tailored to Saudi Arabia under the umbrella of the Saudi Museums Commission and Ministry of Culture.

Selected Curatorial Projects (contact me for full CV)

Most recently, I paired curatorial vision with market strategy by conceiving modern and contemporary presentations for Hafez Gallery in Jeddah and Riyadh and at Art Dubai, Menart Fair, Abu Dhabi Art, L’Art Pur, Eye of the Collector, and Sotheby’s London, placing art history-defining artworks in private and public collections (and achieving record prices). Other highlights in my role as Curatorial Director of the gallery included an expansive group exhibition to inaugurate its new branch in Jax/Riyadh and a solo exhibition in collaboration with the Diriyah Biennale.

Previously, in Amsterdam, I co-conceived the project Bourgeois Leftovers, embedding new commissions amid seventeenth-century genre paintings from the Van Abbemuseum to question what histories collecting institutions choose to forge and preserve. In Bahrain, the three-week public arts festival Alwan338 // Foundations turned an entire district into a laboratory for 27 new site-specific works, while the exhibition Modern Miracles traveled between a fifteenth-century monument in Cairo and a bastion of Hellenistic history in Alexandria to explore photography’s role in shaping collective memory.

My projects often migrate: Notes for Tomorrow, co-curated with ICI, has been re-imagined at eighteen venues from Istanbul’s Pera Museum to the National Gallery of Zimbabwe; Occupational Hazards, selected from more than 500 proposals for apexart’s NYC Open Call, transferred conversations about the circulation of artworks in and out of the Middle East to Downtown New York City. In a rare feat, another exhibition proposal of mine won the other apexart International Open Call, resulting in an upcoming, co-curated (with Adham Hafez) group show in Casablanca about the staging of the body in contemporary Arab art. Other recent projects include Amina Yahia’s first solo exhibition, at Hunna هُنَّ in Kuwait, and the group show See You Online at Contemporary Image Collective / CiC Cairo.

These geographically varied, often collaborative initiatives reflect my commitment to threading local narratives into an international dialog.

Education

My academic path moves between art theory, curating, cultural economics, and diplomacy, disciplines that together shape how I negotiate the global art ecosystem. I began with a BA in Fine Arts and Art & Media Theory at the Zurich University of the Arts, then refined my curatorial practice at De Appel’s acclaimed Curatorial Program in Amsterdam. Two advanced degrees at Erasmus University Rotterdam (an MA in Arts & Culture Studies and a P-MA in Cultural Economics) deepened my grasp of how ideas circulate through markets and institutions. Most recently, a postgraduate diploma in Global Diplomacy and Cultural Policy at SOAS, University of London, has sharpened my ability to translate artistic vision into cross-regional partnerships.