Photo by Latifah Albokhari

Raya Kassisieh Born 1991 in Amman, Jordan, is a multidisciplinary artist working between Amman and London. Drawing from her Palestinian heritage and background in textiles and pattern-making, her practice spans sculpture, installation, and writing, engaging questions of grief, materiality, the body, and how space is shaped through making. Kassisieh’s practice contemplates the ongoing renegotiation of being foregrounding the body’s engagement with materials and their respective processes as the ultimate tool.

Her work proposes the body as a pliable form shaped through labour, repetition, and material negotiation. Drawing on practices of co-creative production, she treats lineage as a mode of knowledge carried through touch, pacing, and collective making rather than as fixed identity. Working across soft and hard materials including steel, wool and cotton, Kassisieh explores how bodily intelligence operates within both intimate and industrial contexts, and how established social hierarchies can be softened through interdependent modes of production.

Across paintings, objects, and large-scale installations, her practice moves between inward, personal processes and expanded material systems, attending to thresholds between vulnerability, grief and structure. Her work often questions autonomy, responsibility, and co-authorship that emerge through the conditions of making itself.

Kassisieh studied fashion design at Pratt Institute, New York, and completed an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. Her recent exhibitions include SAMoCA, Riyadh (2026); the Islamic Art Biennale, Jeddah (2025); Hunna Art, Kuwait (2024); Bermondsey Project Space, London (2024); Bayt Al Mamzar, Dubai (2022); Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2022); and Hangar Space, Amman (2022).