Abeer Aref is an artist and architect based in Yemen. She is a recipient of the Prince Claus Seeds Award in 2024. Abeer uses photography to capture the beauty of everyday moments, drawing inspiration from her surroundings and culture. Her artistic practice delves into personal experiences while reflecting on broader themes of connection and distance. She explores the intersection of culture and identity, the relationships between people and their environments, and gender equality.
 

Aya Abdallah is a visual artist and architect based in Beirut. Working with text and image (moving and still), her current research examines the labor of mourning involved in reconstructing destroyed gravestones in the cemeteries of South Lebanon’s border villages, considering how rituals of grief become forms of dwelling. She holds an MFA in Digital+Media from the Rhode Island School of Design (2024) and was a fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (2025). 
 

The Sudanese artist Esraa Rahma uses painting and research to explore issues of social justice, memory, and belonging. Her works are both open questions and attempts to find answers – particularly in the context of postcolonialism and experiences of crisis. She is interested in the intersections of the humanities and memory studies and asks how external changes influence our relationship to places and to life. Esraa's works are in private collections in Ghana, Uganda, and the Netherlands.

Mohamed Ismail Shawki (Ismail) is a Cairo-based visual artist working at the intersection of art, activism, and public space. A graduate of Egypt’s High Institute of Cinema and co-founder of the street art collective Mona Lisa Brigades, he employs sculpture and installation to interrogate urban life, power structures, and neglected infrastructure. His practice recontextualizes everyday objects—such as street barriers—with humor and criticality, exposing themes of authoritarian urban planning, systemic neglect, and societal shame.