Alia Zaal is a multidisciplinary artist from the United Arab Emirates who explores memory, history, and her surroundings’ changing urban and natural environment. Exploring the connection between vision and perception, her work often tracks the interplay between digital and analog. Her paintings are based on personal photographs – of interiors, landscapes, and scenes extracted from her visual diary. The transformation of images from one medium to another is seen as an allegory of the perceptions and lenses through which memories pass. 

Zaal’s artwork has appeared in exhibitions worldwide, including in the UAE, Bangladesh, Germany, Spain, Italy, New York, and Bethlehem. Her paintings have been acquired by the UAE Embassy in Washington, DC and the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as private collections, such as the Barjeel Art Foundation.  

In 2022, Zaal participated in the “Pathways” exhibition organized by Hunna Art in collaboration with Raffles The Palm Dubai and had her first solo exhibition, “I Saw Time Passing (I),” at the Foundry Downtown in Dubai. Zaal was awarded Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French ambassador to the UAE. She holds a BA in fine arts from the University of Sharjah and an MA in art history and museum studies from Sorbonne University.