Teaching Artist Fellowship
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
Asma Khoory
Asma Khoory is an artist born in Dubai, she graduated in 2017 with a BFA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Practices from Zayed University, and in 2018 she was part of the fifth cohort of The Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2022 Asma completed her MA in Anthropology and Museum Practice from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally at Art Dubai, Meem Gallery, Warehouse 421, Al Serkal Avenue, Jameel Arts Center, Nieuw Dakota in Amsterdam, and Southeast Missouri State University in the US.
She investigates reality, memory, and narrative and how they often merge or contradict one another through materials, and she is interested in the intersection of personal memory versus public memory. Asma's artistic practice revolves around themes of manufactured time, human relations and conversations, hazy dreams, and collective memory through the mediums of painting and mixed media.
Faissal El-Malak
Faissal El-Malak (b. 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Dubai and London. Interested in themes of memory and the metaphysical, he sources images from the subconscious through his work as a healer. These images are treated through embodiment practices using movement, voice and a variety of visual mediums.
He completed the MFA in fine art from Goldsmiths University of London in 2023 with the support of the Tashkeel Scholarship Fund.
Hala Abora
Hala El Abora (b. 1999) is an artist based in the UAE whose work explores the shifting nature of archives, evidence, and time. Through printmaking, photography, sculpture, and digital technologies, she examines how histories are embedded in landscapes and materials, engaging with archaeology and geology as methods of excavation, both literal and conceptual. Her practice resists static interpretations of place and history, proposing that landscapes and archives are not passive containers of information but active sites of negotiation, power, and imagination. By working with materials and images in states of transformation, fractured, eroded, or on the verge of disappearance, she interrogates the instability of documentation and the fragile relationship between truth and the archive in an era of post-truth narratives.
Hala’s work was showcased at several exhibitions, including Unstable Grounds, 421 Arts Campus, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2024); Elemental Relations, Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy (2024); Press Print!, Aisha Al Abbar Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2023); Nostalgia, Ayyam Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2023); Getting Over the Color Green, Engage101, Dubai, UAE (2023); Xposure International Photography Festival, Sharjah, UAE (2023); While The Coffee Grounds Settle, Gotham Gallery, Washington, DC, USA (2022); Calculating Chaos, Rewaq Gallery, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE (2022); SGC International Conference, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA (2022); Confluence II, Universiti Sains Malaysia, IE Art Projects, Malaysia (2022); Exit 16, The Studio Gallery, Sharjah, UAE (2021), among others.
Hala was awarded the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award (2023) alongside her team, and was a member of the Jameel Arts Youth Assembly (2022-2023) and is currently in the Dubai Public Art 2025 Education Programme. Hala holds an MFA in Art and Media from NYUAD (2025) and a BFA from the University of Sharjah (2021).
Karine Roche
Karine Roche is a visual artist living in the UAE since 2009. She works across multiple media, including digital, ink, oil, resin, and collage. Her practice explores the interplay between nature, memory, and human development. Her artistic research investigates our connection to the landscape and the environment, while engaging deeply with the act of painting itself through manuality and the formal language of composition, rhythm, and color. She studied Fine Art and Landscape Architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art in Paris. She is currently represented by RIZQ Art Initiative gallery in Abu Dhabi. In the UAE, she has exhibited at the Sharjah Art Museum, Tashkeel, MIA Art Collection, Art Sawa Gallery, and the French Institute. She participated in Campus Art Dubai 9.0 Blockchain Edition during Art Dubai 2021. Her works are held in private and corporate collections, including the Abu Dhabi Executive Office, the Cultural Programs and Heritage Festivals Committee, GL Events, the Colas Foundation, the City of Vitry-sur-Seine (France), and the West Lake Museum in China.
Salmah Almansoori
Salmah Almansoori is an Abu Dhabi-based multidisciplinary artist, born in Ghayathi, Aldhafra, in 2001. Her studio practice investigates the intersections of identity through place, time, and memory, where she has developed a diverse body of work that includes site-specific installation, painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and video. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE, in 2023.
Almansoori’s recent milestones include the solo exhibition Memories Are Home held in 2024 at Cala Del Forte, Ventimiglia, Italy, and participation in major group exhibitions such as Who I Became at Bluewaters Artfest and The Fifth Wife at Firetti Contemporary, both in Dubai. Her work has been showcased at leading international art fairs, including Abu Dhabi Art and MENA Art Fair in Paris. In recognition of her contributions to contemporary Emirati art, she was awarded the prestigious Beyond Commission by Abu Dhabi Art (Department of Culture and Tourism) and the National Grant for Culture and Creativity by the UAE Ministry of Culture and Youth in 2025.
Her works have been showcased in the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Poland, Argentina, Italy, France, and Portugal, reflecting both regional relevance and international reach.
Sarah Afaneh
Sarah Afaneh is an artist (b. 2001) with an interdisciplinary practice that integrates writing, textiles, printmaking, and photography.
Her practice evolves from a curiosity with abstractions of text, color, and symbol, using play and intuition to reimagine individual and collective socio-cultural histories. She is currently developing a series of work that embodies, archives, and translates grief through language, image, and textile—acts that become liberative gestures of mourning.
Sarah is currently a fellow in the Teaching Artists Fellowship at the Manarat Al Saadiyat Art Studio, and an alumni of the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF). Her work has been featured in Bayt AlMamzar and Satellite (Dubai), and published in Dukkan Collective, Sumou Mag, Global Art Daily, The National, and Fiker Institute. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Literature & Creative Writing, as well as Social Research & Public Policy, with a minor in Political Science, from NYU Abu Dhabi (2022).
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?
