Roudhah Al Mazrouei

Artist Profile

Roudhah Al Mazrouei (b. 2003, Al Ain, UAE). Lives and works in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Roudhah Al Mazrouei is an Emirati painter and researcher who works mainly in oil, alongside public sculpture, film and printmaking. Her subject is the landscape of the UAE, its mountains, deserts and coast, and the memory and knowledge carried by materials found there.

Alongside oil, oil stick and oil pastel, she uses materials gathered in the region: rocks from mountain terrain; sikham, a charcoal made from native trees; and snaah, a mixture of saffron and mahlep once used as perfume. Her canvases are often large and wide, some close to three metres across, and show mountain ranges, palms, valleys and coastline in layered colour. Works include Mountain Palm Mountain (2023), in sediment pigment and acrylic, followed by later versions in oil; Terrain (2024), in snaah, oil and charcoal; and the long, narrow Cotton Range paintings (2026). Her public work includes Urban Fabric (2022), made with Gerald Jason Cruz and Jennifer Tsai: four sculptures shaped like lengths of thread that appear to pass into and out of the ground.

Al Mazrouei received a BA in Art and Art History from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2024 and an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2025. Urban Fabric won the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Award in 2022 and was unveiled at Abu Dhabi Art. She has since made public commissions for the Dubai Gold Souq (2024), the Sharjah Islamic Festival (2025) and the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial in Al Ain (2026). She has exhibited at Palazzo Mora, Venice (2024), and at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2025). In 2026 she presented a solo booth at Art Dubai with Taymour Grahne Projects, which represents her. She is a Kawader Research Fellow at Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, NYU Abu Dhabi, researching the history of art education in the UAE since the 1970s.