Djamila Bent Mohamed was born in the Casbah of Algiers in 1933, and grew up there alongside her older brother and sister. Her father died during her childhood; her mother taught the art of carpet making in a school for crafts. D. Bent Mohamed attended the Collège Gambetta in Algiers city centre. When she became a teenager, her paternal uncle and legal guardian instructed her to wear a veil, but the young woman refused, and resisted the order with a silent protest. ‘Since then, my life has been a daily struggle, an eternal battle’, she would later confide in an interview with author Djamila Flici Guendil. D. Bent Mohamed went on to study at the Cours complémentaire français, and developed an interest in local craftsmanship and traditional embroidery. This led to her enrollment at the Algiers École des Beaux-Arts, where she studied under the miniaturist and illuminator Mustapha Ben Debbagh (1906–2006).

From the beginning of the 1950s, D. Bent Mohamed would engage wholeheartedly in the fight for Algerian independence. In 1953 she joined the Association of Algerian Muslim Women (Association des femmes musulmanes algériennes, AFMA), a group of independence fighters, and when war broke out in 1954 she suspended her artistic education in order to join the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques, MTLD), fighting alongside nationalist leader Messali Hadj. The artist’s brother, Mohamed, was arrested in 1957 by the French authorities; soon after, D. Bent Mohamed was also imprisoned, undergoing torture before being released thanks to the efforts of a collective of five lawyers, including the Franco-Tunisian feminist Gisèle Halimi. Upon her liberation, the young artist was introduced to several European intellectuals, including Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, and Maurice Clavel, who would cite her as the inspiration for his 1958 novel-essay Le Jardin de Djemila.

When Algeria won its independence in 1962, the École des Beaux-Arts reopened, and D. Bent Mohamed was able to resume her studies. Her professors were Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), M’hamed Issiakhem (1928–1985), Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991) and again M. Ben Debbagh, with whom she continued to explore neo-Moorish decoration, an experience that would influence her visual style. Increasingly interested in design, she began to travel abroad. From 1969 to 1971 she studied industrial design at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, followed by industrial aesthetics at the École supérieure des arts et métiers in Paris. On returning to Algeria, she taught at the École régionale des beaux-arts of Oran. Between 1971 and 1974, D. Bent Mohamed was department head and designer at the National Society for the Research, Production, Transport, Transformation and Commercialisation of Hydrocarbons (Sonatrach). She then worked for the National Society for Chemical Industries (SNIC) between 1975 and 1976, and from 1979 to 1988 as project managing designer, decorator and outfitter at the National Society for Electricity and Gas (Sonelgaz). Between 1975 and 1983, within the space of just eight years, the artist was three times laureate of the Grand Prix de la peinture de la Ville d’Alger, receiving an honorary diploma in 1987. Her works can be found in the collections of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, the Musée du Bardo in Algiers and at the Barjeel Art Foundation.

D. Bent Mohamed’s paintings are symbolist: through semi-abstraction she evokes dreams, the links between the invisible and the visible, and a mystical ideal, in dark images inspired by North African myths and legends. Arabic calligraphy and enigmatic figurative characters blend together in her works, whose forms sometimes nod to Western artistic trends. The artist has been known to use sand and gold leaf in her paintings.

At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, D. Bent Mohamed stopped painting following the suicide of her friend, the Algerian poet Rabhi Zohra, better known as Safia Ketou. This time of mourning mirrored the paralysis of cultural activities in Algeria during the period of the civil war, known as the décennie noire, or Black Decade.