Ola Saad Znad

Ola Saad Znad is an Iraqi architect, born in Baghdad, who left Iraq after the 2003 war and grew up in Bahrain. She is based in Dubai and works across architecture, urban design, research and installation. Her installations use reed, mud and palm leaf, the building materials of the Iraqi marshes, while her research looks at cities, identity and communities that architecture tends to overlook.

Much of her work turns on the mudhif, the reed guesthouse of the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. An Absent Mudhif, from 2022, uses reeds and palm leaves to recall a structure that is no longer built as the marshes lose their water. For Dubai Design Week in 2024 she made A Present/Absent Mudhif with Ahwari craftsmen in Iraq, its broken outline standing for that loss.

Znad graduated in architecture from the University of Bahrain in 2018 and later took a master's degree in architecture at University College Dublin. Her undergraduate thesis, a pedestrian bridge for Baghdad, won the Graduate Students Project Award in 2018. She received the Abwab commission at Dubai Design Week in 2024 and took part in Time Space Existence in Venice in 2025. In January 2026 Al Riwaq Art Space opened City by City towards Home, built from the research behind the mudhif. She co-founded Manama Lab and Design Majlis.