Bio:
Zahra Jewanjee is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in the UAE. She holds her BFA from the National College of Arts, Pakistan, and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, USA. My work investigates the idea of organized chaos through collective behaviors driven by the human need to belong. By observing group dynamics through the lens of entropy and evolution, I seek to dissolve, renegotiate, and reimagine habitual boundaries. Drawing from science, Sufism, and mythology, the work looks at how groups connect and disconnect, forming borders that shape both individual and collective experiences while engaging with themes of agency and marginalization. Through this process, I offer a form of visual poetry that operates as an anthropological response, exploring the landscape as a vessel that holds memory, myth, intervention, and possibility.
Zahra Jewanjee was awarded the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship with a full scholarship in 2016. In 2024, she received the Pollock-Krasner Grant, along with the Art Jameel Research and Practice Platform Project Grant. Her residencies include the Djerassi Artist Residency Program in California, Residency Unlimited in New York, Nika Project Space Residency, Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in the United States, Konvent Residencia in Spain, and Campus Art Dubai in the UAE.
She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with her work featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale, RISD Nature Lab, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, MAS Context Chicago, Guernica Magazine, and Take On Art. Zahra is the founder of the SoZa Collective and teaches at the American University in Dubai.
