Aliya Al-Adwani

VISUAL ARTIST

United States

Summer 2026

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Contact Info

Instagram: @aliyaaladwani

Website: aliyaaladwani.com

BIOGRAPHY

Aliya Al-Adwani is an interdisciplinary artist working across multiple disciplines, such as drawing, textiles and installation. She received her bachelor’s degree in architecture from Pratt Institute and her MFA from Parsons School of Design. Her practice revolves around notions of place and hybridity. Often through a play between legibility and illegibility, through what can be seen or recognized and what can’t, her work lives in the spaces in-between—between borders, between languages, between cultures. She is interested in what gets lost in translation—in the movement from one thing to another, and in the coexistence of multiples.

PROJECT

Aliya’s practice exists between multiple ongoing projects, intertwined by the idea of an in-between space. She sees these as creating a hybrid culture from the gaps and overlaps of her own multi-layered heritage. Fes, as a city rooted in tradition and the cultural heritage of the Arab world, provides fertile ground to engage with the themes in her work—the tensions between preservation and loss, between rootedness and hybridity, between language and identity. During her time in Fes, she will develop the ongoing work, “Phonetic Orthographics”—the characters of a fictional alphabetic system derived from a combination of the English 26-letter alphabet and its phonetic translation into Arabic. Concerned with the fickleness of language to communicate a singular truth, and a questioning of what gets lost in translation, in this system, an alphabet is not fixed, or solid, or a singular foundation, but something built out of pieces of a puzzle that are moving, shifting, changing over time—language as an in-between space, one in which the meaning of things can be found and lost over time.