Abeer Seikaly is a Jordanian-Palestinian interdisciplinary thinker and maker, who works across architecture, design, fine art, and cultural production. She founded Studio Abeer Seikaly in Amman, Jordan, in 2010.

Abeer’s practice is grounded in ‘acts of memory’: journaling, documenting, archiving, and collecting. She weaves ‘narrative threads’ from these memories.

Abeer draws inspiration from traditional knowledge in the Arab homeland. She views her practice as a ‘social technology’ for cultural empowerment. Through her fieldwork, she collaborates with Bedouin women in Jordan’s Badia desert on textile weaving and tent making, and engages palm based craft ecologies in Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia. Across these encounters, she repositions indigenous practices as systems of embodied knowledge, recovering the intimacy of handmaking and the wisdom held in material and process.

In 2002, Abeer received her Bachelor of Architecture and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). After an architecture career in luxury retail design and mixed-use developments, her practice began to reflect her cultural context.

In 2010, Abeer was the director of Sunny Art Fair, the first contemporary art fair in Jordan. In 2012, she won The Rug Company’s Middle East Wallhanging Design Competition. In 2013, she won the first Lexus Design Award for her work, Weaving a Home. She was the producer for Adel Abidin in Finland.

In 2015, Abeer co-founded and co-directed Amman Design Week (ADW), a biennial initiative in Jordan that promotes local and regional design. In 2018, she established ālmamar, a cultural experience and residency program in Amman, Jordan.

In 2021, In 2021, Abeer was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture, where she taught the advanced graduate studio, titled Conscious Skins. She was on the board of Beit Al Bawadi. She was a lead participant in Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023.

In 2024, as Artist in Residence at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi, she worked with a master net-maker to explore structure, language, and memory through the craft of net-making. In 2025, she co-designed and facilitated The Al Khoos Residency with Ithra (Saudi Aramco), developing a curriculum grounded in palm-based craft and collective material learning.

Now Abeer’s work, Tirhal: To Al Ahsa is currently on view at Ithra Museum as part of Eternal Crafts: Communal Weaving. She also curated Miramar Al Nayyar’s exhibition Hujra — حُجرة at Tabari Artspace in Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, part of an ongoing collaboration that expands her methodology into contemporary art practice.

A lifelong diarist, Abeer continues to ‘read backwards while writing forwards’ in order to surface and interrogate themes and narratives that echo her work and life. 

Her works have been exhibited at many institutions: Ithra Museum (Dhahran, 2025); Beyti Beytak. My Home is Your Home. La mia casa è la tua casa (2025) at the Qatar Pavilion, 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia; Vitra Design Museum, Basel (2024); Hong Kong Science Museum, Hong Kong (2023); Science Museum, London (2022); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2022); The Miyake Issey Foundation, Tokyo (2021); Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2020); MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017); and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2016). Her latest exhibitions include: Arab Design Now (2024), headline exhibition for Design Doha in Doha, Qatar; Shelter (2022–2023) at CVPA Swain Gallery (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth) in New Bedford, USA; Re-rooting (2022) at Darat Al Funun in Amman, Jordan; The Year 2121: Futures In-Sight (2021) at The Miyake Issey Foundation in Tokyo, Japan; La Manufacture: A Labour of Love (2020) at Gare Saint Sauveur Cultural Institute in Lilles, France; and Radical Curiosity. In the Orbit of Buckminster Fuller (2020) at Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, Spain.

Her works can be found in multiple private and public collections, such as Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah (in Amman, Jordan), Qatar Museums, and Barjeel Art Foundation (in Sharjah, UAE).

Abeer is also a frequent speaker, panelist, and lecturer.

Watch her TEDxKlagenfurt talk here.

Watch her Yale School of Architecture lecture here.