Sama Alshaibi’s artwork situate her own body as a site of performance in consideration of the social and gendered impacts of war and migration. Her work complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images. In 2021, Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. Her monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, was published by Aperture, NYC in 2015. It features her 8-year Silsila series, which probes the human dimensions of borders, migration, and ecological demise. Her biennial participation includes the 55th Venice Biennale (Italy, 2013), the 13th Cairo International Biennale (Egypt, 2019), and the 2017 Honolulu Biennial (Hawaii). She was also selected for the ‘State of The Art 2020’ (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Arkansas, 2020), and recently held solo exhibitions at form & concept gallery (Santa Fe, 2021), Ayyam Gallery (Dubai, 2019) and at Artpace, where she participated as the National Artist in Residence (San Antonio, 2019). Alshaibi received the first prize Project Development Award from the Center (Santa Fe, 2019), and the 2017 Visual Arts Grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (Beirut). Other solo exhibitions include the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, NY (2017) and SMoCA (AZ, 2016). Her over 150 group exhibitions include MoMA (NYC), American University Museum (Washington D.C.), Marta Herford Museum of Art (Germany) and Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris). Born in Basra to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother, Sama Alshaibi is Professor and Co-Chair of Photography, Video and Imaging at the University of Arizona, Tucson in the United States.
