Aïcha Haddad was born into a family of six children whose ancestors were Hachem tribespeople; horse riders living on the Medjana plains. Her artistic expression is closely tied to her memories of growing up in the north of the Hautes Plaines region: the colours of the natural world saturate her work; the sapphire blue and emerald green of the sea at the beaches of Béjaïa where her family spent holidays, while lilacs, roses and poppies perfume the air. Her aptitude for drawing was noticed at an early age by her school teachers, who held up her watercolours as an example to her fellow pupils.

After travelling to Sétif to train as a nurse, the young A. Haddad started working in the municipal hospital and in her hometown of Bordj Bou Arreridj. In 1956, at seventeen, she left home to fight in the Algerian War of Independence, joining the underground in the wilaya III (Kabylia). It was only the next day, upon reading the Gazette de Constantine, that her parents learned of her departure – the headline ran ‘Three nurses kidnapped by the FLN’ (National Liberation Front). In August 1956, A. Haddad participated in the Congress of Soummam. She was subsequently arrested as part of a group of fighters and spent several years detained in various concentration camps and prisons.

Upon her release in 1962, when Algeria gained independence, A. Haddad’s passion for drawing and painting was rekindled. She moved to Algiers, where she joined Camille Leroy’s (1905–1995) course at the Société des Beaux-Arts, rubbing shoulders with future stars of Algerian art including Aïssa Hamchaoui (1939–2001), Michel Nedjar (1947–) and Mustapha Belkahla (1949–2023). Between 1966 and 1988 she taught drawing at the Lycée Omar Racim in Algiers, and in 1983 took up the position of inspector of visual arts at the Ministry of Education.

A. Haddad’s artistic career can be seen as being influenced both by the Algerian miniature tradition and the currents of Western painting. She deals with classical subjects, including coastal and Saharan landscapes, portraits of Tuareg women and warriors, and processions. She often experiments with relief, covering her canvas or support with a paste made of sand that she then divides with curves, squares and fragmented lines, recalling veils, the domes of mosques or the motifs of traditional nomadic weavings. It was in the 1970s that her work started gaining recognition from the institutions, when she participated in the prestigious painting competition of the City of Algiers and was awarded a prize. This accolade was the beginning of A. Haddad’s involvement in national artistic life. In 1973, she joined the Union nationale des arts plastiques (UNAP), going on to travel and exhibit extensively across Algeria and around the world, and winning several awards.

Works by A. Haddad can now be found in various Algerian galleries and museums. In Algiers, these include the Musée National des Beaux-Arts and the Musée National du Bardo. Further afield, she appears in the collections of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome; at UNESCO headquarters in Paris; in Tokyo; in the United Arab Emirates and in a number of private collections. In 1975, the artist received a gold medal at the Festival of Arab Painters in Kuwait. For her, however, the most precious of her many distinctions came in 1997, when UNESCO awarded her a medal for the writing and illustration of a children’s book, published by UNICEF and entitled L’Île aux arcs-en-ciel [The Island of Rainbows].