Dena is an Iraqi born transnational artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker, and a mother. She is Visiting Scholar at the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Davis and Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Her work appears in a diversity of publications including: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War Anthology, among others.
Her artwork takes on varied practices including performance, video art, installation, digital art, photography, sculpture, and text. She creates performative, relational works, dedicated to participatory art, socially engaged projects, and collaborative engagement. She has exhibited her work at Art 13: London: Modern and Contemporary Art Fair; Museum of Tunisia and Galerie le Violon Bleu in Tunis; Bastakiya Art Fair in Dubai; Falaki Gallery, Mashrabia Gallery, and Darb 1718 in Egypt; and Light Work Gallery and Mana Contemporary in New York, as well as the Arab American National Museum and the National Veterans Art Museum in the United States. She has been a resident artist and collaborated with Light Work, Mana Contemporary, Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, Utopia School by Flux Factory, ARAB.AMP, HEKLER and other artist-run spaces. She is ethically committed to making the arts, humanities and social sciences meaningful to communities outside the academy through long-term educational collaborations and community organizing initiatives.
During her residency at RITM she will be developing an ongoing multimedia project titled An Archive of Future Memories: A Letter to my Daughter. The multimedia project illuminates survival practices in the everyday, through charting the interconnections between a trilogy of personal forced displacements, and their relationship to pivotal moments in contemporary Iraqi and American histories, the ongoing living effects of U.S. military interventions, and their ever-evolving effect on intergenerational relations. The multimedia project weaves biography, photography, drawing, video, sound, letter writing, and a 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—both the hopes and the trauma.