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. Zahra’s work explores the notion of organized chaos through collective behaviors shaped by the need for belonging and protection. Her interest in looking at group behaviors through the lens of entropy and evolution is an attempt to dissolve, renegotiate, re-invent, and reconcile habitual silos. Drawing from science, Sufism, and mythology, she examines how group dynamics connect, disconnect, and form borders that create individual and collective experiences alongside themes of agency and marginalization, offering visual poetry and an anthropological response.
Zahra was awarded the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship and Full Scholarship in 2016. She received the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Grant 2024 and the Art Jameel, the Research and Practice Platform - Project Grant. Her residencies include the Djerassi Artist Residency Program in California, Residency Unlimited in New York, Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, USA, Konvent Residencia in Spain, and Campus Art Dubai Residency in the UAE. She exhibits nationally and internationally, and her work was featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale, RISD NatureLab, Harper's Bazaar Arabia, MAS Context Chicago, Guernica Magazine, and TakeonArt. Zahra is the founder of the SoZa Collective and teaches at the American University in Dubai.
