Dahlia Elsayed is an artist and writer who makes text and image based work that connects internal and external experiences of place in narrative maps and created landscapes. These short visual fictions take the form of paintings, drawings and installations and use symbols of hard data (flags, signs, borders, geologic forms) to frame soft data (wordplay, metaphors, lists, idioms) allowing image and language to continuously modify each other.
Her work has been exhibited widely, including the 12th Cairo Biennale, Robert Miller Gallery, BravinLee Programs, and The New Jersey State Museum and is in the public collections of the The Newark Museum, The Zimmerli Museum, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, The US Department of State, amongst others. She has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, Women’s Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The NJ State Council on the Arts. She earned her M.F.A. at Columbia University and is associate professor of fine arts at CUNY, LaGuardia Community College in New York.
At MacDowell, she made an Atlas of Nowhere, a folio of paintings on paper based on an autobiographical narrative told through the lens of a female explorer.
