Sama Alshaibi, born in Basra, Iraq in 1972, uses performance photography to create political works of resistance. This subject matter was directly influenced by her own personal and generational experiences of exile. S. Alshaibi’s family fled from Palestine to Iraq as refugees of the Palestine War in 1949, before once again being exiled in 1981 due to the violence of the Iraq-Iran War. They relocated to Saudi Arabia before ultimately settling in the United States in 1986 when S. Alshaibi was 14 years old. She received a BA in Photography from Columbia College in Chicago in 1999 and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Media Arts from the University of Colorado in 2005.
She employs the minimalist vacuity of arid geographies to isolate her own image, her body acting as a symbol within her work, which aims to explore the consequences of war, migration, and oppression. S. Alshaibi does not consider her presence in these works to be an act of self-portraiture, but rather functions as an allegory of the exoticization of Arab women combined with the ongoing assault on their lands. Using a variety of media including photography, videography, sculpture, and installation, S. Alshaibi expresses her concern for refugees and evokes the feelings of weakness that coincide with displacement, whether for political or environmental causes.

Bringing her personal story into conversation with longer histories of exile, S. Alshaibi’s works embody the burden of displacement, war, and her understanding of the complicated dynamics between the Middle East and the West. This is evident in her photograph Water Bearer from the project Carry Over (2018), which depicts the image of a woman hoisting an oversized vessel above her head, representative of the psychological weight of conflict on the individual, while engaging with the orientalist depictions of Arab women by European and Anglo-American photographers.

One of S. Alshaibi’s most formative and widely shown solo exhibitions is Sama Alshaibi: Silsila. Displayed by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (Arizona, 2016), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (New York, 2017), and the Hatton Gallery (Colorado, 2022), Silsilia, Arabic for “link,” explores the spiritual connection between people and land. Through photography of the human form alongside the diverse landscapes of the Middle East, she encourages viewers to consider the futility of the human attempt to command nature, utilizing techniques of reflection and pattern within her works as a recognition of traditional Islamic art.

S. Alshaibi has received numerous honors, including a Fulbright Scholars Fellowship (2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), and the Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award from the Phoenix Art Museum (2021). She has taught at the University of Arizona as a Professor of Photography since 2006, for which she has received multiple awards, including the University of Arizona’s 1885 Society Distinguished Scholars Award in 2013. Her work has been collected by The Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Arab American National Museum in Michigan.