Art & Culture

Meet Five Emirati Women Defining the Next Generation

BYKhaoula Ghanem

August 28, 2026

There has never been one way to be an Emirati woman, and the next generation is making that increasingly difficult to ignore. They are curating major museums, touring Europe making Arabic shoegaze, changing the way women dress in the Gulf, taking Emirati stories behind the camera, and shaping Abu Dhabi’s luxury ambitions from the inside.

For Emirati Women’s Day, we’re looking at five women whose careers are making us pay attention. Different industries, different backgrounds, and very different ideas of what success looks like, but each is carving out space on her own terms. We also asked them what being an Emirati woman means to them. Their answers, much like the women themselves, resist an easy definition.

Mayah AlKhateri

Mayah Alkhateri does not exactly fit the image you might conjure up when someone says “Emirati musician,” which is exactly what makes her so interesting. Half Emirati and half Egyptian, she is one half of Kiss Facility, the Arabic shoegaze duo she formed with producer Salvatore Navarrete, better known as Sega Bodega. Alkhateri sings exclusively in Arabic, her voice floating over the kind of hazy, distorted production more commonly associated with an underground club in London than the Gulf.

The project has traveled remarkably far, and, remarkably fast. Kiss Facility released its debut album Khazna this year and is currently touring Europe, while its music has already found its way into the hands of Fred again.. and Skepta, both of whom have sampled the duo’s work. Before all of that, Alkhateri was modeling and working in social media in Dubai, gradually developing the visual identity that now feels inseparable from her music. Gothic, cyberpunk, and occasionally otherworldly, hers is a version of Emirati femininity rarely afforded this kind of visibility.

Yet beneath an aesthetic that can feel deliberately futuristic, Alkhateri’s understanding of herself remains rooted in the past. “I am a Bedouin girl,” she says, tracing her father’s family back to Hamham in Ras Al Khaimah. She speaks particularly of the women she grew up learning from, and the role Emirati women have played as a “social backbone for generations.”

“I love the strength and the power Emirati women hold,” she says. “Everything I’ve learnt from them brought me to who I am today.” And who she is today feels refreshingly difficult to categorize. Alkhateri can tour Europe making Arabic shoegaze, dress like she stepped out of a dystopian video game, and still speak about the Bedouin women of Ras Al Khaimah as the foundation beneath it all. None of those things cancel each other out. In fact, with her, they make perfect sense together.

Rawdha Al Thani

Before pastel abayas became practically unavoidable on the streets of the UAE, Rawdha Al Thani was already making them. The Moroccan-Emirati designer founded Illi during the pandemic, at a moment when the abaya landscape still leaned heavily toward black, minimal, and traditional silhouettes. Al Thani went in the opposite direction, introducing contemporary cuts, soft washes of color, and playful patterns that made the abaya feel considerably less serious. The imitators followed soon after.

Even the name carries something personal. Illi means “my daughter” in Amazigh, a nod to Al Thani’s Moroccan roots and the dual cultural identity that informs her work. Her background in architectural design and visual arts also makes sense once you look closely at the clothes. There is an instinct for proportion, shape, and composition behind all that whimsy, helping Illi develop a visual identity distinctive enough to become one of the reference points for a new generation of abaya labels.

Al Thani is equally matter-of-fact about what being an Emirati woman has afforded her. “I don’t think I’ve ever had to fight for a seat at the table just because I’m a woman,” she says. “And I know how lucky that makes me.” Growing up, she saw Emirati women running companies, building families, or doing both, and crucially, none of it was presented to her as extraordinary. “It felt normal,” she says.

That normalcy might be one of the UAE’s more consequential success stories. Al Thani grew up assuming the doors would be open, which left her free to decide for herself which ones she actually wanted to walk through. “Being an Emirati woman, to me, means getting to define that for myself,” she says. In her case, that meant building a brand entirely on her own terms, and watching an industry that once played it safe become a little more colorful in the process.

Sara Bin Safwan

Sara Bin Safwan has been thinking seriously about art, and who gets to contextualize it, since long before Abu Dhabi became one of the art world’s most closely watched cities. The Emirati-Honduran art historian is widely considered part of the UAE’s first generation of Emirati woman curators, and today, she is helping shape one of the capital’s biggest cultural arrivals yet as a curator at the forthcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Her practice extends well beyond the museum walls. In 2023, Bin Safwan received her MA in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy from Goldsmiths, University of London, an academic grounding that feels particularly relevant to a curator working in a region still negotiating how its histories are collected, interpreted, and presented. She has since curated exhibitions both locally and internationally and co-founded Studio Salasil, a future-facing curatorial studio built around research, experimentation, and care.

That last word comes up often when Bin Safwan speaks about leadership, too. “We are the carriers of change,” she says, describing Emirati women as responsible for building confidence in the generations around them, from “our youth” to “our mothers before us.” For her, leadership starts on a much more personal scale: “I always want to be the woman I would be to my younger self.”

It is an interesting philosophy for someone whose job involves deciding which stories, artists, and ideas deserve space inside cultural institutions. Bin Safwan believes in leading through “love, care, and transparency,” and in a kind of Emirati female power that has little interest in announcing itself. “It’s a power that you know is there,” she says, “and will last infinitely beyond us.” Considering the institutions she is helping build, that last part feels especially apt.

Meitha Aldiwani

If Abu Dhabi’s luxury scene has been feeling increasingly ambitious lately, Meitha Aldiwani has had something to do with it. At Abu Dhabi Retail, she works behind the scenes shaping the capital’s luxury landscape, developing partnerships and experiences designed to strengthen the city’s place on the global retail map. So far, that has translated into multiple activations spanning luxury, culture, and retail.

Her route there was hardly predictable. Aldiwani graduated from Zayed University with a Bachelor of Science in Finance in 2015, but before entering the world of luxury retail, she spent time on the creative side of media as a creative director at Zahrat Al Khaleej, the pioneering Arab women’s magazine that has been a fixture in the region for generations. That ability to move between numbers, storytelling, culture, and commerce feels particularly suited to an Abu Dhabi that is interested in where all four meet.

For Aldiwani, however, ambition has never required leaving her identity at the door. “Being an Emirati woman is a big part of how I see myself and how I move through the world,” she says, describing a pride grounded as much in values and culture as nationality itself. She notices it most when she travels, particularly in conversations with people who once called the UAE home and still speak about what they miss years later. “There’s something special about seeing my country through their eyes,” she says.

Perhaps that explains something about the career she is building back home. Aldiwani belongs to a generation of Emirati women who carry a strong sense of where they come from while remaining intensely curious about everything beyond it. As she puts it, it is about being “curious about the world” while “confidently creating my own path.” In her case, that path happens to be helping shape what Abu Dhabi looks like to the rest of it.

Sarah Alhashimi

For Sarah Alhashimi, filmmaking is something of a family business. The Emirati filmmaker grew up with a father who made films himself, introducing her to the medium long before she would eventually step behind the camera. Her first documentary short, which followed an autistic adult and his family, went on to receive recognition on the international festival circuit, setting the tone for the kind of work she wants to keep making: stories from the UAE that can speak to audiences far beyond it.

That mission continues to shape Alhashimi’s work, alongside a wider ambition to use film to start conversations around subjects that can be difficult to discuss within her own community. But as the UAE’s creative industries have grown, she has also become increasingly interested in a question that tends to get overlooked.

“There seems to be a real disconnect between wanting to tell stories about Emirati women and actually trusting Emirati women to tell them,” she says. It is a frustration sharpened by the reality that Emirati filmmakers and creatives remain a relatively small group within a much larger industry. She sees the contradiction most clearly around occasions like Emirati Women’s Day, when campaigns celebrating local women can still be commissioned without meaningfully involving the women whose culture and experiences they depict. “If Emirati creatives aren’t being sought out, trusted and given opportunities when the subject is our own stories, our own women and our own culture, then when exactly are we supposed to be given that priority?”

Her point is about making room for the people who already possess the cultural understanding others are often brought in to approximate. “We can tell when something has been made from genuine understanding and when our identity has become part of a marketing calendar,” she says.

Alhashimi grew up surrounded by Emirati women who showed her there was never a single way to be one, and she wants the images coming out of the country to reflect that same breadth. For her, visibility only goes so far. “It has to mean valuing our voices, trusting our talent, and allowing us the space to tell our own stories,” she says. “Because we are more than capable of doing so.”

Meet Five Emirati Women Defining the Next Generation

Mayah AlKhateri

Rawdha Al Thani

Sara Bin Safwan

Meitha Aldiwani

Sarah Alhashimi

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Meet Five Emirati Women Defining the Next Generation

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