About Ayah Bdeir

Ayah Bdeir is a media artist, engineer and interaction designer. She graduated from the MIT Media Lab with a Masters of Media Arts and Sciences after studying Computer & Communication Engineering and Sociology in the American University of Beirut.

With an upbringing between Lebanon, Canada and the United States, Bdeir’s work uses technology to look at cross cultural dialogue and media representation of the Middle East and its identities. Her work spans a range of mediums including interactive installations, electronic fashion, gadgets, reactive furniture, and has been published and exhibited in conferences, festivals and galleries in Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Rhode Island, Boston, Sao Paolo and others.

Ayah is now an artist fellow at Eyebeam, a gallery for art and technology in Chelsea, New York.

Ayah Bdeir’s Making Arabs Fun

Making Arabs Fun is a series of works by Ayah Bdeir (ie: me) that seeks to do just that. For several years, and since moving to the United States from Lebanon, I have been making work that looks at the representation of culture, and specifically Arab culture. I had never been so aware of my identity and its cachets until I went to Boston for school and was repeatedly asked why i didn’t wear a veil, or why I spoke English so well, or if women in my country could work.

By exposing funny aspects of everyday Arab life, or absurd representations of Arabs in mainstream media, we invite Arabs all over the world to join us in our campaign to laugh at ourselves, but also (and more importantly) to present a nonthreatening, charming alternate view of the Arab world to a western media that often tends to homogenize Arabs and portray them as aggressive people in repressive societies, which we, by the way, respectfully disagree with.

In the series:
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arabiia
teta haniya’s secrets
les annees lumiere

www.ayahbdeir.com