Sama Raena Alshaibi

Sama Alshaibi (b. 1973, Iraq) is an artist based in the United States and working between photography, video, and installation. Her practice explores the notion of aftermath—the fragmentation and dispossession that violates the individual and a community following the destruction of their social, natural, and built environment. In her photographs and videos, Alshaibi often uses her own body as both subject and medium, a staging site for encounters, peripheries, and refuge, even when carrying the markings of war and dislocation. Her work complicates the coding of the Arab female figure found in the image history of photographs and moving images. Alshaibi’s sculptural installations evoke the body's disappearance and act as counter-memorials to war and forced exile.

Alshaibi was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2021, the Art Matters Betty Parsons Fellow in 2023, the Fulbright Fellowship in 2014, and was selected as a Resident Fellow at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Italy in 2024. Her work has been exhibited in numerous biennales and museums, including the 55th Venice Biennale, the 2020 State of the Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, the 13th Cairo Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Institut Du Monde Arabe, the Barjeel Foundation, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Arab American National Museum. Aperture Foundation published her monograph Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In, featuring the artist’s Silsila series. Alshaibi 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. Alshaibi is a Regents Professor of Photography, Video and Imaging at the University of Arizona.