Ayad Alkadhi is a contemporary Iraqi artist born in Baghdad and raised between Iraq, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. His formation and personal experience are situated within a historical context marked by Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Iran–Iraq War, and the Gulf War—elements that constitute the background of his artistic research. Over the course of his life, he has been a migrant more than once and has lived across four continents, developing a perspective deeply shaped by the encounter with diverse cultural environments.

Alkadhi holds degrees in art, design, and engineering, an educational path reflected in the structure of his work, where methodological rigor and conceptual inquiry coexist. He defines his practice as that of a visual storyteller, creating works that originate from personal experience and extend toward broader themes related to the human condition.

He currently lives and works in New York. His exhibition activity has developed internationally, including shows in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, New Zealand, and the United States. Among his most recent exhibitions are those held at the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Queens Museum, the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, and the Station Museum in Houston.

His works are included in major international permanent collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (Shangri La) in Honolulu, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, the Barjeel Foundation in the United Arab Emirates, the Farjam Foundation in Dubai, and the Black Gold Museum in Riyadh.

Through a trajectory developed across different geographic and cultural contexts, Ayad Alkadhi’s practice articulates a research that intertwines personal experience with a global dimension, maintaining a thematic coherence connected to contemporary social and cultural transformations.