Dena Al-Adeeb

Dena Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi born feminist scholar-activist, artist-cultural worker, and mother working at the intersection of U.S. imperial war geographies, militarism, and racial capitalism as they manifest through collective memory, petroculture, material and visual culture in the Middle East region with an emphasis on SWANA, Diasporaic and Queer transnational art and futurisms.  Al-Adeeb’s scholarly interests include Critical Race and Postcolonial Theory, Arab/Muslim Diaspora, Critical Refugee Studies, Transnational Feminism and Queer of Color Theory, Militarism, Art and Architecture, Archeology and Heritage, Visual and Material Culture, Extractive Economies and Petro-cultures, Critical Museum Studies, and Futurisms.

She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, an M.A. in Sociology-Anthropology from the American University in Cairo, and a B.A. in International Relations from San Francisco State University. Al-Adeeb is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Davis (UCD). She is also a recipient of fellowships from the American Association of University Women and Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Al-Adeeb served as a Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

She taught at several institutions such as New York University, San Francisco State University, and Pratt Institute. She has served as a Lecturer Faculty in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University. She has also taught at New York University offering courses that range from Approaches to Metropolitan Studies to Media and Global Communication to the Islamic Revolution of Iran and Islamic Golden Age. She also taught in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. At Ex'pression College for Digital Arts, she taught in the Department of Graphic Design and Visual and Creative Media. Dena has also worked in a range of fields including graphic design, multimedia, and user-interface design and architecture.

Al-Adeeb’s scholarship takes the ongoing War on Terror and the U.S. military invasion of Iraq as a site from which to explore questions of gender violence, neocolonialism, race and ethnicity, extractive capitalist economies, and militarism in comparative and transnational perspectives. She is currently working on her book manuscript, entitled The Architecture of War: The U.S. Destruction of Iraq, Petro-cultural Imaginaries, and Collective Memory in the Persian Gulf Region. The book project critically investigates the interconnected relationship between material and visual culture, militarism, and energy resources — especially oil — as they relate to the reconfiguration of the built environment, urban space-making, and social and cultural identity. She analyzes these reconfigurations through a comparative transregional perspective linking the interventions in Iraq with the relatively recent developments in the Persian Gulf region as global art and cultural centers. Analyzing the effects of war and extractive economies that are made visible and materially tangible, she account for transformations in cultural and social identities, collective memories and imaginaries that are ineluctably tied to global processes of wealth creation and militarized violence that have shaped the recent mass global migrations of people from the region to cities across the globe.

She is also developing an ongoing multimedia project, entitled “An Archive of Future Memories: Letters To My Daughter.” Part I of this project was recently published in Amerasia Journal for a special issue on “Critical Refugee Studies” and was performed at the Grey Area Grand Theater in San Francisco. The multimedia project illuminates fugitive survival practices in the everyday and weaves biography, photography, letter writing, and a feminist practice of bearing witness to the textures of war based displacement and racialized dispossession, especially in the moment of exile. It also identifies the often convoluted, fragmented, and grief-filled memories that accompany transnational migration and refugee movement—the penultimate relationship between hope, grief, and the trauma.

Her work appears in a diversity of publications including: Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War Anthology, The Color of Violence Anthology, among others.

Her artwork investigates the relationship between the politics, poetics and aesthetics of mapping collective memory, fugitive survival practices, intergenerational relations and narratives. Her artwork takes on varied practices including performance, video art, installation, digital art, photography, and sculpture. She creates performative, relational works, dedicated to participatory art, socially/politically engaged projects and collaborative engagement. She has been a resident artist and collaborated with Light Work; Mana Contemporary; Pro Arts Gallery & Commons; Utopia School, Flux Factory; ARAB.AMP; HEKLER, and other artist-run spaces. She has exhibited, performed, and screened her work at Art 13: London: Modern and Contemporary Art Fair, London; Galerie le Violon Bleu, Tunis; Bastakiya Art Fair, Dubai; Falaki Gallery, Cairo; Mashrabia Gallery, Cairo; Darb 1718, Cairo; Light Work Gallery, New York; Mana Contemporary, New Jersey; Arab American National Museum, Michigan; National Veterans Art Museum, Chicago; Center for Architecture, New York; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; Soundwave and Grey Art Foundation, San Francisco, among others.

Her lived experiences as a refugee, immigrant, and woman of color inform her scholarship and art and inspire her engagements in community organizing and movement building with the peoples and struggles whose histories, societies, and cultures are under attack. In this vein, she has been involved in building grassroots political organizations, such as her work with: Arab Resource and Organizing Center; Women of Color Resource Center; San Francisco Women Against Rape; Center for Political Education; INCITE!; Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence. The experience of being rooted within a community is critical to her scholarship, activism, art practice, and pedagogical praxes.