Where scholarship and art
refuse to stay separate.

Dena Al-Adeeb works in the space where scholarship and art refuse to stay separate. An Iraqi-born transnational artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker, and mother, she was raised in Iraq and Kuwait and displaced twice by war — fleeing Baghdad before the Iran–Iraq War, and again during the 1991 Gulf War. These lived experiences of refuge, immigration, and survival as a woman of color are not background to her work; they are its analytic and aesthetic core.

Her transdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of U.S. imperial war geographies, militarism, and extractive capitalist economies in West Asia, foregrounding the visual, material, and petro-culture of the Arab and Muslim worlds. In her book-in-progress, The Architecture of War: The Destructions of Iraq and the Rise of Petro-cultural Imaginaries in the Persian Gulf Region — growing out of her doctoral work at NYU under Ella Shohat — she traces the relationship between architecture, archaeology, art, and the politics of militarized visual culture across neo-colonial and imperial processes in the Middle East.

That same inquiry animates her art. Across performance, video, installation, digital art, photography, sculpture, sound, and text, she makes performative, relational, participatory works that map collective memory, refugee narratives, and war-torn architecture and geographies. In An Archive of Future Memories: A Letter to my Daughter, she writes to her daughter to trace a trilogy of displacements against the ongoing effects of U.S. militarization in Iraq. In Crossings / عبور, made with sound artist Sholeh Asgary, she reaches back to the Epic of Gilgamesh to excavate the relationship between racialized necropolitical destruction and bodies in protest across time and space.

As a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies, she insisted that catastrophe is not a theoretical horizon but a present, material condition: “Apocalypses are not in the future. Apocalypses are happening now.” Whether writing a chapter on petro-cultural imaginaries or staging an electro-acoustic expanded-cinema performance, Al-Adeeb pursues one decolonial project — making the geographies of war and oil legible, and making the arts, humanities, and social sciences meaningful to communities far beyond the academy.