"I paint the landscapes of the northern Emirates — the mountains, wadis, and villages my family comes from, especially Siji. I treat these places not as fixed scenery but as ground shaped over generations: by endurance, by adaptation, and by people who have learned to read the land closely.
Landscape is how I work through memory and inheritance. I'm drawn to the places documentation tends to overlook, and to the distance between what a land holds and what gets recorded about it. Working in oil, through gestural mark-making, layered surfaces, and the occasional surreal shift, I try to slow an image down so it resists being read as a single, settled version of the past.
Much of my work sets green valleys against stark mountain and desert terrain, refusing the assumption that such places are empty or peripheral through the punchy colors. Survival here, in the mountains, the desert, along the coast, is a continuous act of negotiation and care. These environments don't sit behind history; they hold it. I want a viewer to stay with that, and to reconsider how a landscape carries, alters, and keeps what it has lived through."
Roudhah Al Mazrouei is an Abu Dhabi-based visual artist and researcher whose practice traces cultural memory, ecological heritage, and the archives of landscapes overlooked by documentation. Working primarily in oil painting alongside film, sculpture, sound, and public art, she returns repeatedly to the mountains and villages of the northern Emirates, treating the land itself as a site of inherited knowledge.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Personal Structures at Palazzo Mora during the Venice Biennale; the Saatchi Gallery, London; and the Sharjah Islamic Festival. In 2022 she received the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award for a public installation now permanently sited at the Rabdan Marina, and in 2024 she was named an Emirati Woman Achiever and a Rhodes Scholarship Finalist.
Alongside her studio practice, Roudhah is a Kawader Research Fellow at Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, where her archival research examines the development of art education in the UAE from the 1970s onward. Her broader commitment to arts education spans 421's People of Determination programming, the public programming of the UAE Pavilion at Expo Osaka 2025, and NYU Abu Dhabi's Arts Proxy Program.
Roudhah holds a BA in Art and Art History from New York University Abu Dhabi and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London.
Roudhah is currently working with Taymour Grahne Projects.