Amal Khalaf is a curator, artist and consultant who serves as Director of Programmes at Cubitt (2019–present) and is also co-curating Sharjah Biennial 16 (February–June 2025), in the UAE. In 2026 she will be curating Art Dubai’s Bawwaba section of the fair and Bawwaba extended commissioning large scale art works across the fair’s sites. 

 

Amal Khalaf served as the Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries (2009–2023), where she shaped the Civic programme and commissioned over 50 long term, collaborative projects in neighbourhoods across London.  Here and in other contexts she has developed public sculptures, residencies, exhibitions and collaborative art projects and urban interventions working on over a dozen Serpentine Architectural Pavilions working closely with artists, architects, producers and audiences.  She recently launched Support Structures for Support Structures, a fellowship and grant programme for artists working in the field of community practice and spatial politics now in its second year.  Commissioning over 70 collaborative artistic commissions, notable projects include Radio Ballads with Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Rory Pilgrim and Ilona Sagar  (2019-22), an exhibition and research project in London; Sensing the Planet (2021) a gathering of musicians, artists and climate activists in Dartington, Devon; Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People with Rehana Zaman; Implicated Theatre a migrant justice project grounded in Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies (2010-2019) and The Edgware Road Project/Centre for Possible Studies (2009-2013) working in with CAMP, Ultra-red, Hiwa K, Lamia Joreige, Rania Stephan and Marwan Rechmaoui amongst others. In 2019 she curated Bahrain’s pavilion for Venice, and in the same year she curated the main pavilion for LaBiennale at the Grand Palais, Paris.

 

In 2018 she co-curated an international arts and social justice conference called Rights to the City in London and in 2016 she co-directed the 10th edition of the Global Art Forum, Art Dubai. Producing over 35 artist films in the last decade, RAFTS by Rory Pilgrim was nominated for a Turner Prize, 2023, Zadie Xa nominated for a Turner Prize, 2025 and Everything Worthwhile… by Rehana Zaman won the Jarman Award, 2023.  She is a trustee of Mophradat, Athens and not/nowhere, London and is on the Advisory Circle of Art Jameel, Jeddah and Dubai as well as the Skulptur Projkete, Munster, Germany. 

 

She is also a founding member of the GCC art collective, creating public art works as well as exhibiting at MoMA PS1, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Whitney Biennial, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Berlin Biennale, the Fridericianum, Kassel and the New Museum, New York amongst others.  She has written extensively on art, is a Contributing Editor for BOMB, New York and formerly Projects Commissioning Editor for online journal Ibraaz (2011-2015) and is the co-editor of publications Vertical Atlas (ArtEz press, 2022), How We Hold: Rehearsals for Art and Social Change (Koenig, 2023) and Radio Ballads Songs for Change (K.Verlag 2025) amongst others.

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