Mays Albaik is a visual artist working across video, performance, text, and installation. Her practice explores how the body carries, resists, and negotiates place—particularly within conditions of displacement, linguistic fragmentation, and migration. Born in Abu Dhabi to a Palestinian Syrian family from Neirab Refugee Camp near Aleppo, her work interrogates how embodied habits are shaped by distance and rupture, often through poetic narrative and formal restraint.

Her solo exhibition A Terranean Love Note (Tashkeel, Dubai, 2021), developed under the mentorship of Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Ala Younis, grounds many of her ongoing inquiries into language and belonging. Her work has since been shown at institutions such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi (Richard Mille Art Prize, 2022), KBH.G Foundation in Basel (Evaporating Suns, 2024), Manarat Al Saadiyat (Portrait of a Nation, 2022; Zemanna, 2021), and in international showcases such as Geopoetics of the UAE at the UAE Embassy in Brussels (2023). She has participated in curated and research-based residencies including Postcolonial Ecologies (Darat Al Funun, Amman, 2021) and the Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi.

Mays has presented talks and participated in panels at institutions including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, NYU Abu Dhabi, and the College Art Association Annual Conference. She was recently featured in the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennale x Dirwaza Curatorial Lab Talks (2025). Her writing has appeared in Future Perfect (Kaph Books), Mizna, The Outpost Magazine, A Dance Mag, and Postscript Magazine.

She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Sharjah.

Born in 1991. Lives and works in Abu Dhabi, UAE.








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