
Reem is a performance arts/theater director and writer from the UAE who collaborates with artists from diverse backgrounds to devise theater pieces or research-based works. She integrates traditional practices as tools in her creations, with poetry and various forms of language playing an essential role. Reem views spoken language as a powerful medium for exploration through performance.
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As a writer and performance artist, she collaborated with director Joanna Settle on Al Raheel | Departure, a bilingual piece that reflects on how women from different generations navigate the rapidly changing life in the UAE, which won the 2020 Gulf Capital ADMAF Creativity Award. Reem’s lecture performance Deliberately and in Cash examines the evolution of the Diya money practice, honoring Kuwaiti journalist Hidaya Sultan Al-Salem. She also collaborated with Maitha Al-Suwaidi on Amulets of Palm for the More Than Human festival, depicting the palm as a mystical entity—a work later adapted into a short film for Art Basel.
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As creative director of A Tale in Every Nahma, the main show at the Maritime Heritage Festival in Abu Dhabi, Reem worked closely with heritage performance groups, drawing inspiration from the lived experience of Nokhatha Yomaa Bin Hathboor and highlighting the Gulf’s traditional vocal art of Al Nahma. Most recently, Reem directed Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle, an absurd Emirati play in collaboration with writer Ahmed Almadloum, using satire to critique real-life bureaucratic inconveniences faced by employees here and worldwide.