Team

Salwa Mikdadi

al Mawrid Director and Principal Investigator

Salwa Mikdadi is a Professor of Practice of Art History at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research and interest in Arab art spans over fifty years focusing on modern and contemporary art of the Arab world, the history of Arab art institutions, gender politics in art, and the relationship between museums and society. Before joining NYUAD, she taught at Sorbonne-Paris Abu Dhabi and served as Head of the Arts and Culture Program at the Emirates Foundation. She has curated numerous exhibitions including the first Palestine exhibition at the Venice Biennial (2009), A Century in Flux: Highlights from the Barjeel Collection (Sharjah Art Museum, 2018), and Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World (USA 1994-5). She is the editor of several books and catalogs: Elias Zayat: Cities and Legends, Palestine c/o Venice, Visual Reflections on Arabic Poetry, In/Visible: Arab American Artists, New Visions: Arab Contemporary Art of the 21st Century.

Nada Shabout

Senior Investigator

Nada Shabout is a Visiting Professor of Art History at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) and founding director of Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA). Shabout has published widely on modern and contemporary Arab and Iraqi art. She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (University of Florida Press, 2007); co-editor with Salwa Mikdadi of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century (Thames & Hudson, 2009); and co-editor with Anneka Lenssen and Sarah Rogers of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018). Notable among exhibitions she has curated: All Manner of Experiment: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group (Hessle Museum, CCS Bard, 2025); A Banquette for Seaweed: Snapshots from the Arab 1980s (2022-2023); Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art (2010); traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art (2005-2009); and co-curator of Modernism and Iraq (2009).

Anneka Lenssen

Senior Investigator

Anneka Lenssen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California Berkeley and a former senior fellow (Spring 2022) in the Humanities Research Fellowships for the Study of the Arab World program at NYUAD. A scholar of global modern and contemporary art, with a focus on the Arab world and SWANA region, she is author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (University of California Press, 2020) and co-editor with Nada Shabout and Sarah Rogers of an anthology of translated art writing, Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018). She is an art editor for the journal Critical Times and serves on the editorial board of Representations, among other editorial collaborations. As an investigator with al Mawrid, she will be contributing to work on developing the Arab Art Collections.

Jonathan Burr

Archivist

Since 2016, Jonathan Burr has worked on a variety of collections in al Mawrid’s Akkasah Photography Archive, including the digitization of the Samir Farid collection, a collection of negatives created on the sets of Egyptian films from throughout the 20th century. His professional interests lie primarily in digitization and online access to digital research materials, especially endangered archives that have become inaccessible, overlooked, or are in immediate danger of physical deterioration. Jonathan holds a BA in American Studies from the University of Maryland College Park and a master’s degree in Archives and Records Management at the University of Dundee.

Ibrahim Mohamed Ali

Archivist

Ibrahim Mohamed Ali leads the archival processing, cataloging, and accessibility of the Arab Art Archive collections at al Mawrid, NYU Abu Dhabi. His current research focuses on developing specialized cataloging frameworks for Arabic-language archival collections to enhance their accessibility and discoverability. Mohamed Ali also implements preventive conservation measures to ensure the long-term preservation of archival materials during processing and storage. Before joining al Mawrid, he worked as a documentation and preservation specialist on significant projects, including the Ministry of Antiquities glass negative archives, and the Attaya Gaddis studio archive. Mohamed Ali was a preservation and digitization specialist at the Grand Egyptian Museum Conservation Center (2010 - 2018). He completed internships in photograph preservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH), and attended the MEPPI workshops between 2011- 2017.

Mohamed Ali taught courses and lectured on the processing and preservation of archival collections in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan. He presented his research on archival collections at various conferences, including the ICA Congress 2023 and the Digital Archiving in the Arab World 2024. Mohamed Ali holds an MA in Museum Studies from George Washington University and a BA in Conservation from Cairo University. 

ORCID https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8336-5334

Maysa Shaer

Research Assistant

Prior to joining NYUAD, Maysa Shaer held a year-long archival fellowship at the Williams College Special Collections and Rare Books Library. At Williams, she collaboratively processed a number of diverse archival collections, primarily focusing on the papers of writer and educator Sterling A. Brown and the Library’s Graphic Arts Collection. Her research interests lie at the intersection of material culture and social theory where she studies the capacity for art and artists’ movements to influence the public sphere. In the archive, she seeks to critically engage the role that archival practices play in knowledge production of and about the Arab world. Maysa holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Williams College.

Roudhah Al Mazrouei

Kawader Fellow

Roudhah Al Mazrouei is an Emirati researcher and visual artist based in Abu Dhabi. Her practice is rooted in cultural memory, ecological symbiosis, and archival preservation, engaging with painting, sculpture, film, and public art. Her research focuses on how alternative archives, from oral histories to ecological materials, shape cultural memory and reconfigure narratives of art history in the Gulf. She is particularly interested in how artistic practice can act as a living archive, carrying forward forgotten or overlooked forms of knowledge.

Al Mazrouei has participated in exhibitions such as Resonances: Memory, Land and Transformation at the Hockney Gallery in London, Narratives of Belonging at Al Safa Art and Design Library in Dubai, Personal Structures at Palazzo Mora as part of the Venice Biennale, and In Context at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi. She is the recipient of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award (2022), the Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Award (2023), and the NYU Founders Day Award (2024). Al Mazrouei holds a BA in Art & Art History from NYU Abu Dhabi and an MFA from the Royal College of Art in London.

Maha Moussa

Manager of Administration

Maha Moussa has over twenty-five years of experience in project and office management. She worked as an executive assistant at the board level and has coordinated several projects with diplomatic missions.

She holds a BA in Business Administration from the American University of Beirut with certifications in Project Management Professional (PMP), Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), and Research Administration (RAA).