Dahlia Elsayed

Dahlia Elsayed is an artist and writer who makes fictional landscapes using painting, installation, and sculpture. Her work is based on pairing diasporan narrative with a terra firma, connecting internal and external sense of place to create pictures for placelessness.

Ranging from small dioramas to large site-specific installations, these allegorical landscapes are located in the ambiguous margin of East/West and tell unreliable oral histories, and anticipate alternate futures through a symbolic vocabulary rooted in cartography, comics, and cosmology.

Elsayed’s work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions throughout the United States and internationally, including the 12th Cairo Biennale, Robert Miller Gallery, BravinLee Programs, The New Jersey State Museum, and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is in the public collections of the Newark Museum, the Zimmerli Museum, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, the US Department of State, amongst others. Her work has been supported by awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, the MacDowell Colony, Women’s Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the NJ State Council on the Arts. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is Professor of Humanities at CUNY LaGuardia Community College in New York.

www.dahliaelsayed.com