Teaching Artist Fellowship
PROGRAMME OVERVIEW
The Teaching Artist Fellowship is a structured five-month residency based in Art Studio, Manarat Al Saadiyat. The Fellowship is designed for artists who value community engagement within their artistic practice and are interested in honing their teaching skills. The programme offers six teaching artists the opportunity to set up their studio within a vibrant learning environment, while developing their creative and teaching practice through chosen areas of research. Selected fellows participate in professional development seminars delivered by leading regional and international partners and are provided training on designing meaningful learning experiences while learning how to effectively communicate their practice to various audiences. At the end of the fellowship, artists can expect to build effective communication skills, facilitation experience as well as a robust teaching portfolio.
Meet the Fellows
abdelghani alnahawi
abdelghani alnahawi is a Palestinian artist from the UAE. His work often begins with walking, biking, noticing—gathering fragments and listening to how found objects and urban residue shift, mark, or resist their surroundings. From these encounters, installations take shape, growing attentive to overlooked textures. Lately, he has been revisiting these gestures and collaborators through performance studies, asking how movement, pause, and spatial experience might themselves be ways of making. Teaching remains central to his practice: he cultivates learning spaces where listening is making.
Over the past decade, abdelghani has intervened in both gallery and public spaces and has led critiques, workshops, and studio courses. His teaching has spanned sculpture studios at RISD, middle-school classrooms in Central Falls, and community programmes in Abu Dhabi, where he develops approaches that blend material exploration, gesture, and collective attention. Through these experiences, he continues to investigate how making, learning, and listening intersect across different audiences and contexts.
ANA ESCOBAR SAAVEDRA
Ana Escobar Saavedra has a cross-disciplinary practice working on the frontiers of art and craft. Born and bred in Colombia, after living and working 16 years in Italy and France, she has been established in the UAE since 2020. With a background in textiles, and metal-smithing, her practice explores the emotional and material relationship between people and objects, addressing universal themes such as existence, identity, migration, and the rituals surrounding life and death.
She holds an MA in visual arts, specialized in Object, Jewellery and Material Culture, in a joint program between MASieraad Amsterdam and PXL-MAD school of arts in Hasselt, Belgium. Ana has exhibited in the UAE in Sharjah Art Museum, Alserkal Avenue, Foundry, ICD Brookfield space, Tashkeel, Bayt Al Mamzar and was recently selected for the ADP program of 421 Abu Dhabi, resulting in her first institutional solo show in May 2025.
She has also been invited to show her work in Colombia, Argentina, China, Australia, the United States, and multiple cities across Europe.
ARNOLD BARRETTO
Arnold Barretto (b. 1996, India) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, printmaking, and bookmaking. His work explores themes of identity, space and desire, with a focus on that which is personal. Working primarily with analog processes, Barretto foregrounds the tactile nature of image-making and the quiet intimacy of printed matter and draws on the physicality of materials to invite slower, more contemplative engagement.
He holds a BFA in Studio Art (Photography and Graphic Design) from SUNY Plattsburgh, NY (2019). He has collaborated with artists, cultural institutions, and community initiatives, and teaches workshops in analog photography at Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai, UAE since 2022. In 2023, he was part of the tenth cohort of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF), AD. His work has been included in group exhibitions in the United States and the UAE.
FATIMA UZDENOVA
AI-generated portrait from personal reference images.
Fatima Uzdenova (born in Karachay-Cherkess Republic, USSR) is an antidisciplinary artist whose practice ranges but is not limited to sculpture, performance, writing, sound and walkatives. She is interested in two overlapping ideas: ‘garden’ as a space of conquest, a spiritual terrain, a source of nourishment(s), and ‘fi ctive’ as a methodology of art production. She lives and works in Sharjah.
Fatima holds an MA Sculpture degree from the Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom. She is an alumna of the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF), in partnership withthe Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, United States of America. Uzdenova is a recipient of the inaugural Al Burda Endowment from the Ministry of Culture and Youth (MCY), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
NADA ALMOSA
Nada Almosa (b. 1999) is an Abu Dhabi-based Palestinian artist and creative writer. Her practice navigates memory, identity-making, and play through mixed media, photography, and creative writing. Her works draw inspiration from her Palestinian heritage as well as the desire to preserve memory and chronicle stories of diaspora. She is a graduate of Literature & Creative Writing from New York University Abu Dhabi (2021). Nada has participated in the VICE residency by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company (2022), a mentorship program with Nujoom Al Ghanem (2023), and the Spectrum: Photographers in Residence program at Manarat Al Saadiyat (2024). She has published works in Corniche, Mizna, Strange Horizons, Sekka Magazine, and Postscript Magazine.
NAGHAM HAMMOUSH
Nagham Hammoush is a German-Syrian interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in printmaking not only as a medium, but as a conceptual and embodied language. She received her BA in Fine Arts (Printmaking) from the University of Damascus in 2013, and later completed an MA in Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) in 2022. Her work focuses on the development of participatory and interactive artistic projects, with a strong emphasis on art mediation and education. She explores themes such as gender, identity, belonging, and feminism.
Hammoush’s artistic practice connects printmaking with other contemporary art forms such as performance and installation. She explores repetition and reproduction as conceptual tools that mirror the cycles of memory, bodily rhythm, and lived experience. For her, printmaking becomes a symbolic and ritualistic act that opens space for both personal and collective reflection.
Through her multidisciplinary and socially engaged practice, Hammoush builds spaces of connection where print, performance, and participation intersect to question how we remember, move, and belong.
Mentors & Faculty
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SEMINARS BY FOCUS 5
Focus 5 provides high-quality, professional learning opportunities and program consulting focused on aligning arts integration, best instructional practices, and current thinking in the field of arts and education. We collaborate and consult with teachers, teaching artists, schools, school districts, arts organizations, arts commissions, arts councils, and museums around the country. We are in classrooms on a daily basis to keep our work refined, relevant, and effective in the ever-growing and evolving field of arts integration and education.
PEER MENTORSHIP
CRISTIANA DE MARCHI
Cristiana de Marchi is a visual artist and writer based in Dubai. She received her MFA with honours in Archaeology from The University of Turin, Italy and is currently a PhD candidate in the Artistic Research Programme at the University of applied Arts, Vienna.
An artist, curator and writer, she has lectured widely on art and, in addition to publishing articles and essays in catalogues and magazines devoted to contemporary art, she conducts personal artistic and literary research. Cristiana works with video and textiles as her privileged medium to explore issues related to identity, displacement, belonging and the porous borders that separate regions, while allowing contact.
Her work has been featured in the Textile Biennale (2023), Yinchuan Biennale (2016), Santa Cruz Biennale (2016), Biennale Donna (2021), Culture of Peace Biennial (2016), and in parallel events to the Singapore Biennial (2013) and to the Istanbul Biennale (2022). Among many other museums and institutions, her work has been presented at the Louvre Abu Dhabi (UAE), Mathaf, Museum of Modern Art (Qatar), Villa Romana (Italy), Sursock Museum (Lebanon), Langgeng Art Foundation (Indonesia), The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (USA), Villa Vassilieff (France), Sharjah Art Museum and Maraya Art Centre (both UAE).
ISSAM KOURBAJ
Issam Kourbaj was born in Syria (1963) and trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Damascus, the Repin Institute of Fine Arts and Architecture in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), and Wimbledon School of Art. He has lived in Cambridge, UK, since 1990. He has been artist-in-residence and bye-fellow, and is currently a lector in art, at Christ’s College, Cambridge University. Kourbaj is one of five members of the jury for the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture (2023–27).
His work has been widely collected and exhibited in several museums around the world: Fitzwilliam Museum, Classical Archaeology Museum and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; Wereldmuseum (formerly Tropenmuseum), Amsterdam; Penn Museum, Philadelphia; Brooklyn Museum, New York, among others.
Since 2011 Kourbaj’s artwork has reflected the suffering of his fellow Syrians and the destruction of his cultural heritage. His Dark Water, Burning World is in the permanent collection of the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum. For the BBC’s ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects,’ Neil MacGregor (the former director of the British Museum) chose it as the 101st object. In 2024, Kourbaj’s work was displayed in concurrent solo exhibitions Urgent Archive and You are not you and home is not home at Kettle’s Yard and Heong Gallery (respectively) in Cambridge (2 March – 26 May 2024).
JUMANA EMIL ABBOUD
Jumana Emil Abboud is a visual artist whose multi-disciplinary practice engages with folklore and water-lore. Her work re-spirits storytelling processes in spoken word, drawing, video, and Water Diviners gatherings – where stories are explored through lived experience, collaboration and water relations, connecting place and possibility.
Her work has been part of the London Design Festival at the V&A (2025), The Diriyah Biennial (2024), Jameel Arts Centre (2022), documenta 15 (2022), the Jerusalem Show (2009, 2018), the Venice Biennale (2009, 2015), and the Sharjah Biennial (2005, 2011). Solo exhibitions include Cample Line (2023), TAVROS (2022), Darat al Funun - The Khalid Shoman Foundation (2017), Bildmuseet (2017), and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2016).
Recognitions include the Jameel Fellowship at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, in collaboration with the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Centre (Cirva), Marseille (2024-2025), and shortlisting for the 2025 Joan Miró and 2025–26 Artes Mundi 11 prizes.
SITES AND SCALE DISCUSSION SEMINAR BY DUYGU DEMIR
Duygu Demir is an art historian and curator with a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology on articulations of modern painting from the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. Before her graduate studies, she worked as a programmer at SALT in Istanbul. In addition to SALT (Ankara and Istanbul), she curated exhibitions at MIT’s Keller Gallery (Cambridge, MA), Arter (Istanbul), and Tate Modern (London). In addition to her academic research, she writes articles and reviews on contemporary art for magazines and online platforms, both in Turkey and abroad. Demir’s research topics include exhibition histories, transnational encounters, and moments of confluence between art and architecture, in addition to contemporary artistic practice, especially of the non-Western kind. Demir was previously the curator of the Art Gallery and Research Assistant Professor in the Humanities Division at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Through lectures, screenings, visits, discussions, and critique sessions, Site and Scale will look at site as a generative force at multiple scales. The seminar will oscillate between the past and the present, aiming to connect existing histories to contemporary practice, striving to stir in examples that are equal parts local and global. Site and Scale will examine theories of site-specificity, rehash debates on public art and monuments, and investigate legacies of land art to expand our thinking about place and placemaking. Treating site as both medium and material, the seminar aims for thinking together in concentric circles: we will begin with the terrestrial, move onto the urban, and finally expand to the domestic to ultimately ask: Can artistic thinking, informed by site, also shift in scale and expand its sphere of influence?
