Sara Aref Ahli (b. 1993, Alabama) is an Emirati and Colombian-American visual artist and designer living and working between Dubai, UAE, and Providence, Rhode Island. Ahli's interdisciplinary practice spans fashion, sculpture, installation, and glass, exploring themes of body, memory, and home.
By engaging with materiality as a narrative, Sara explores intersections between memory, home, and the body. Her work delves into the physicality and labor of making, investigating vulnerability, thresholds, and resilience of the human form.
"Involuntary memories resurface as visual fragments, echoing stories of my past. I undergo an artistic archaeology, excavating these hidden interiors to the surface. Through an embodied practice of shaping glass, I explore physicality and labor, uncovering thresholds of both body and material.”
Her practice emphasizes this embodiment, where shaping glass shapes the body itself. Choreographing a dialogue between body and material, Sara shapes glass in a way that reflects the ephemeral nature of memory. She views tools as extended limbs, assembling, distorting, and conforming molten glass, while recognizing the body as a repository for memory and home as a curator of lived experiences.
Ahli explores the body's thresholds and the fluidity of memory through glass, a dynamic medium that reflects the fragility and resilience of human experience. By reconstructing and reshaping spaces from memory, she creates ephemeral, dream-like portals that blur the lines between creation and deconstruction. She examines how fragments of memory and place, layered and repeated, form a delicate architecture of lived experience, questioning the boundaries between the real, the imagined, and the forgotten.
Sara’s artist career includes recent exhibitions such as The Rhythm of Existence at Aisha Al Abbar Art Dubai (Dubai, UAE, 2025) and A Floor Plan of Echoes at Stedman Lofts (Providence, Rhode Island, 2025). In 2024, she presented Embodied Recollection at the Dye House (Providence, USA, 2024); participated in The Grad Thesis Show at the Rhode Island Convention Center (Providence, USA, 2024); and was part of the Glass Triennial at Woods Gerry Gallery (Providence, Rhode Island, 2024). Previous showcases include The Space in Between at Memorial Hall (Rhode Island, 2023); While the Coffee Grounds Settle at Fathom Gallery (Washington DC, 2022); Either – Or at The Sol Koffler Gallery (Rhode Island, 2022); and exhibitions at Sikka Art and Design Festival (Dubai, UAE, 2022); Villa Aumedan, Iris Art Advisory (Dubai, UAE, 2022); and The Quest at Aisha Alabbar Gallery (Dubai, UAE, 2022). Her earlier work was featured in Made in the Emirates – ENGAGE 101 at Sotheby’s (Dubai, UAE, 2021); and her debut solo show A Placeless Place – ENGAGE 101 at The Foundry (Dubai, UAE, 2021); as well as Community & Critique at Warehouse 421 (Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2020). In 2020, she completed the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) as part of Cohort 7 in collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design.
Sara holds a Master of Fine Arts in Glass from RISD (2024) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fashion Design from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco (2015).