Nujoom Alghanem

Nujoom Alghanem is an Emirati artist, poet, and multi- award-winning film director. She was born in Dubai in 1962, has published eight poetry collections and produced around twenty films including short fiction, short documentaries, art films and seven feature length documentaries. Her films have won local, regional and international prizes. She is the founder of Nahar Productions, a film production company based in Dubai and a professional trainer and mentor in filmmaking, art and creative writing. Her poems have been translated into several languages, including Spanish, German, French, Turkish, Italian, Macedonian, Greek, Urdu and others.
In 1999, she graduated with MA in Media Production, School of Film, Griffith University in Australia.
In 1996, she finished her bachelor’s degree in Video Production from Ohio University in the United States.
Nujoom started practicing drawing when she was in high school, and she continued to paint on doors and walls, considering it only a hobby. In the mid-1980s, after her meeting with the late artist Hassan Sharif, she began producing some paintings and sculptural works at Al-Muaraija Studio in Sharjah, where she had the opportunity to present them to the public for the first time.

In January 1985, she founded the Aqwas group, with artist Hassan Sharif, Youssef Khalil, the late Sudanese storyteller, and Khalid Albudoor, the poet, researcher, and translator.

On March 28, 1985, she participated with the Emirates Fine Arts Society in the fourth annual exhibition at the Expo Center in Sharjah.

In 2017, she was one of five artists who participated in the exhibition Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play curated by Hammad Nasar for the UAE National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She presented her work “Between Heaven and Earth – The body I borrowed” for the first time in an integrated way with sound and images.

In 2018, she participated in the Sharjah’s 21st annual Islamic Art Festival, which carried the slogan “Horizon” with a joint work with the international British singer and song-writer Sami Yusuf, entitled The Room of Mysteries. The exhibition was held at the Sharjah Art Museum.

In 2018, under the assignment of the “U.A.E. Unlimited” platform, she undertook the task of mentoring six emerging artists to participate in the fifth session exhibition titled Tashweesh: Noise of Materials. She also was the guest artist in the same exhibition where she showed her installation work “Around Us”. The exhibition was held at the Maraya Art Center in Sharjah and was curated by Laura Metzler.

In 2019, Nujoom was chosen as the solo artist to represent the UAE at the Venice Biennale in Italy. Passage was the name of the site-specific film she produced, and was co-written, designed and supervised by curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.

In 2021, Nujoom had a solo exhibition named Malamih, in Maraya Art Center in Sharjah, UAE. Under the curation of Dr Nina Heydemann, the exhibition spanned three floors of artworks all shown for the first time. The pieces ranged from paintings, ceramic sculptures, installations, and video art.

Filmmaking:

In addition to being a visual artist, Nujoom Alghanem is also a writer and film director that has been active in the Arab world. She had started in the field of cinema since 1997. Her film “Between Two Banks” was the first Emirati documentary movie to participate in an international film festival in 1999 at the Yamagata International Film Festival for Documentary Films in Japan. Right after that, her films began to participate in international and regional film festivals besides the local festivals.