Bio
Ahlam Khamis is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of performance, installation, and digital media. Her work challenges dominant narratives, inviting new ways of seeing and engaging with the world.
About me
Ahlam Khamis (b.1991)
is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, movement, sound, text, and textile.
Her work engages surveillance, war technologies, and systems of oppression using paradox and poetic disruption to transform tragedy into aesthetic experience.
She holds an MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2025) and a BFA in Theater from California Institute of the Arts (2013).
Khamis’s practice bridges research and ritual, drawing from her background in theater, film, and music to create immersive, multi-disciplinary experiences that invite rupture, remembrance, and radical imagination. Making visible the blind spots in dominant narratives, she uses those revelations—and new imaginations—to build worlds that challenge existing systems and open space for radical transformation.
Artistic background
Between Mediums, Beyond Form
Trained in theater and expanded through intermedia, my practice is a continuous act of weaving bodies, objects, histories, and sound. I approach each medium as a collaborator, each project as a site of tension and transformation.
From intimate performances to large-scale installations, I work to surface what is often buried: inherited memory, systemic violence, and collective longing. The result is not resolution, but resonance—spaces where rupture becomes ritual and the unseen finds form.
Education
University of Maryland, Baltimore County 2025
MFA Intermedia and Digital Arts
Lowery Stokes Sims, Oletha DeVane, Lisa Moren, Kathy O’Dell, Kristin Hileman, Sarah Sharp
California Institute of the Arts, 2013
BFA Theater
Lisa Gay Hamilton, Mirjana Jocovic, Nataki Garrett, Mary-Lou Rosato, Fran Bennett
Exhibitions
CADVC, 2025
The Only Way Out is Through
Magic Carpet, Dancing with the Daffodils, Working Together to Process a Dream
School 33, 2025
Brumation
Khalti Badr, Clove Mask, Drone Menagerie
AREA 405, 2024
We Will Be What We Want To Be
Balaclova, other works spanning from 2021–2024
Peale Museum, 2023
Spark 6: Refractions
Clove Pillow, Drone Menagerie 2
Peale Museum, 2022
Spark: New Light
Cactus Crown
Creative Alliance, 2020
BYFA
Rock Coffin
Selected Works & Experience
This CV maps my journey as an interdisciplinary artist across stages, galleries, and community spaces, where art becomes a site for transformation, questioning, and storytelling.
Born in Baltimore, 2021
Wajib (A Duty), directed by Ahlam Khamis, 2020
San Diego Arab Film Festival, 2021
Wajib (A Duty), directed by Ahlam Khamis, 2020
Arab Women Film Festival, 2020
Wajib (A Duty), directed by Ahlam Khamis, 2020
Johns Hopkins – Baltimore Youth Film Arts Fellowship, 2018-2020
film, curatorial research, video editing
Lucy Bucknell, Annette Porter
William Esper Studio, 2019-2020
Barbara Marchant
On Camera
StarStruck – Trish
Feature Film, 2023 – Dir. Kenny Brossoie
Dr. Sugar – Cherree
Showtime Pilot Presentation, 2018
Day Driver – Ana
Short Film, 2018 – Dir. Cyril Morin
Hacker’s Game – Maid Farha
Feature Film, 2014 – Dir. Cyril Morin
Scorched – Nawal
Zoom Read Series, 2020 – Dir. Ahlam Khamis
Hamlet – Ophelia
Organic Theater, 2019 – Dir. Luke Scaros
Romeo and Juliet Workshop (Equity) – Juliet
2015 – Dir. Derek Magyar
Suddenly Last Summer – Catherine
2013 – Dir. Kameron Steele
Tennessee Williams One-Acts – Vera
2013 – Dir. James Franco
Trestle at Pope Lick Creek – Pace
2012 – Dir. Lisa Gay Hamilton
*Full list available upon request*