Mayasa Al Sowaidi

Mayasa Al Sowaidi is a Bahraini artist and academic. Self-taught as an artist, she works in acrylic and oil on canvas, collage, video and installation, including large painted forms hung directly on the wall. Her surfaces often carry numbers, geometric figures or handwritten words.

Mathematics shapes the practice. She studied it at the University of Bahrain, and balance and order recur across her work. Barcode, an acrylic and oil painting made for Caravan's exhibition I AM, uses the barcode to say that women in the Middle East are not numbers. She later carried that theme into video. Her collage The Identity (2020) drew on news clippings and travel tickets.

In 2016 Al Sowaidi won the Public Vote Prize of the Sovereign Middle East and North Africa Art Prize with a work made from tea bags. That year she showed with BAAB in London, and in 2018 with ArtBAB at India Art Fair. The Golden Ratio, her solo exhibition at the Art Center in Manama in 2023, was curated by Corinne Timsit for the 17th Spring of Culture festival. The Wave, a canvas six metres wide, hung in The Sound of Water there in 2025. She belongs to the Bahrain Art Society, holds a PhD in management from Grenoble (2019) and works as an academic at the University of Bahrain.