Sarah Brahim

Sarah Brahim (b. 1992, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) is a Saudi visual and performance artist based in Riyadh and Milan. She makes live performances, films, video installations and cyanotypes on fabric, built around her own movement and that of other performers. Her installations join projected video with sculptural textiles, sound and blown glass.

Brahim trained as a dancer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and graduated from London Contemporary Dance School in 2016. She also studied community health in Portland, Oregon. Her work looks at how gestures of the body can voice grief, change and the human bond with the natural world. In Soft Machines/Far Away Engines (2021), screens show performers moving, intertwining and embracing. The cyanotype series Who We Are Out of the Dark was shown in Lyon in 2022. NEUMA, The Forgotten Ceremony (2025), made with Ugo Schiavi in AlUla, uses glass vessels activated by performers' breath.

Her first international solo exhibition, Sometimes We Are Eternal, opened at the Bally Foundation in Lugano in 2023. She has shown at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2021) and the Biennale de Lyon (2022). Later came the Islamic Biennale in Jeddah (2023), and in 2024 she gave the closing performance in the public programme of the Saudi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She took part in Between the Tides: A Gulf Quinquennial at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2024. France made her a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2024, and she holds the Pina Bausch Fellowship for 2025 to 2026.