Creative Women Forum Saudi Arabia 2025 –
Art Exhibition
4–6 November 2025
Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh
Empowering Female Creativity: An International Art Exhibition at the Creative Women Forum
An inspiring exhibition featuring award-winning female artists and craftswomen will premiere during the second edition of the Creative Women Forum Saudi Arabia 2025, held under the patronage of HRH Princess Noura Bint Saud Bin Nayef Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, at Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University and the National Museum of Saudi Arabia.
Curated by internationally recognised architect and designer Rafael Porzycki, the exhibition will conclude with an auction in support of Herfah, a Riyadh-based organisation preserving and promoting traditional crafts. The initiative is part of the Ministry of Culture’s “Year of Handicrafts”, bringing together painters, sculptors, digital artists, and artisans who reflect the Forum’s themes of female empowerment, sustainability, and cultural heritage.
This initiative was made possible through the vision and support of the Forum’s Patron, with logistical assistance from DHL Saudi Arabia, enabling the transport of artworks from across the globe.
Featured Artists
Visual Artists
Aida Murad
Jordan
Known for expressive finger paintings that explore healing, empathy, and emotional resilience.
Abeer Alkhlaifah
Saudi Arabia
Draws inspiration from nature, reflecting harmony between humanity and environment.
Saule Suleimenova
Kazakhstan
Works with recycled materials to explore memory, identity, and social change.
Noorah Aldossary
Saudi Arabia
Visual artist and photographer focused on themes of place, memory, and cultural identity.
Sarah Mohanna Al Abdali
Saudi Arabia
A leading voice in Saudi street art, combining traditional motifs with urban commentary.
Craftswomen & Sculptors
Andrea Vinkovic
Croatia
Ceramic artist inspired by organic forms, cultural symbolism, and natural textures.
Fatimah Al Nimr
Saudi Arabia
Blends Saudi heritage with contemporary mixed media; her art centres on women’s stories.
Catherine Coady
Australia
Explores body image, consumerism, and pharmaceutical dependency through sculpture and painting.
Elysia Athanatos
UK-Cyprus
Creates refined ceramic vessels that explore light, memory, form, and emotion.
Olivia d’Aboville
France-Philippines
Uses natural and recycled fibres to comment on ocean conservation and environmental fragility.
Sally Smith
New Zealand
Works with bronze and aluminium, often drawing on natural and negative/positive spatial themes.
Naqsh Collective
Jordan
Founded by sisters Nisreen and Nermeen Abudail, blending Arabic design traditions with contemporary materials.
Sofia Cacciapaglia
Italy
Creates immersive pieces using recycled cardboard and paper, touching on femininity and environmental themes.
Savi
Japan/UK
Sculptural artist creating contemporary armour-inspired pieces rooted in Japanese tradition and ritual.
Elisa Insua
Argentina
Uses discarded materials in vibrant sculptures highlighting overconsumption and waste.
Craftswomen & Sculptors
Selina Scerri
Malta
Explores domesticity, AI, and symbolism through multimedia and digital illustration.
Ekaterina Malakhova
Georgia
Works with generative design and data to reflect on digital identity and collective behaviour.
Art with Purpose
This exhibition embodies the core themes of the Creative Women Forum 2025, female empowerment, sustainability, and creativity, by celebrating the excellence of women in art while contributing to a meaningful and lasting social impact and supporting local female artists through Herfah.
Rafael Porzycki
Rafael Porzycki is an award-winning architect, designer, and art curator, founder of **Creator Unlimited**, and creator of **Theatrum Vitae**, a cultural platform uniting global artists. His visionary work spans international architecture, performing arts, and art curation, including serving as **Art Director of the Creative Women Platform** since 2016.
Aida Murad
Aida Murad - is a Jordanian American impact artist based in Riyadh who creates abstract, emotionally rich works designed to uplift, heal, and help people feel seen and loved. After overcoming a serious health challenge (semi-paralysis lasting about 4.5 years), she adopted finger painting as her medium, using art not just as expression but as a path toward healing — both for herself and for her audience.
Andrea Vinkovic
Andrea Vinkovic - is a Croatian-born ceramic artist now based in Western Australia, whose work is inspired by fragility, organic beauty, and the delicate balance of nature as well as cultural symbolism. She has exhibited widely across Australia since the early 2000s and creates both intimate studio pieces and large outdoor sculptures, while also teaching and running a studio in Perth’s Maylands.
Catherine Coady
Catherine Coady - is a Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist whose work critiques contemporary culture’s fixation on consumption, youth, and pharmaceutical dependency. Her practice moves between sculpture (notably oversized pill works) and painting, engaging themes of mood, identity, bodily control, and our fragile psychological relationship with self in the modern world
Ekaterina Malakhova
Ekaterina Malakhova - is a Russian media artist and graphic designer whose work employs generative graphics, data, text, and typography to probe shifting mindsets, urban life, and digital environments. She frames art as a process of interaction and interpretation rather than a fixed object, posing questions about self-awareness, collective behavior, and temporal flux in her installations and visual projects.
Elisa Insua
Elise is an Argentine artist who creates assemblages and sculptures with discarded materials. Her work engages deeply with themes of over-consumption, value, obsolescence, economics, waste, and how material culture reflects socio-economic systems.
Elysia Athanatos
Elysia Athanatos - (born 1981 in Ascot, UK) is a British-Cypriot sculptor and ceramicist based in Cyprus (and also active in Bologna, Italy), whose work explores the tension between interior and exterior through refined ceramic vessels and sculptural forms. She studied fine arts and sculpture in London and Florence, and later pursued porcelain mastery in China (Jingdezhen) and ceramics specialization in Faenza, combining traditional techniques with contemporary experimentation and sensitivity to “voids,” light, and memory.
Kawther Al Saffar
Kuwaiti artist Kawther Al Saffar blends ancient craft methods and contemporary design, often using recycled metals and traditional sand-casting to create sculptural objects that evoke both history and innovation. Kawther Al Saffar’s artwork stands at the intersection of craft, memory, and material inquiry: she revives and reinterprets traditional metalworking techniques, especially sand casting and dual-metal casting—with a contemporary sensibility.
Lubna Saif Abbas
Lubna Saif Abbas is a Kuwaiti artist and founder of the creative collective Yadawi, which promotes artisanal craft, glasswork, and design practices in Kuwait. She also collaborated with the Corning Museum of Glass on a commemorative glass installation marking Kuwait’s liberation, blending local narratives with global artistic dialogue.
Naqsh Collective
Naqsh Collective - is a Jordanian art and design venture founded in 2009 by sisters Nisreen and Nermeen Abudail, which fuses contemporary and traditional Arabic aesthetics with fine local craftsmanship. Their work often reinterprets motifs like calligraphy, embroidery, and engraving in enduring materials (e.g. stone, brass), preserving cultural memory while engaging a wider, modern audience.
Olivia d’Aboville
Olivia d’Aboville is a French Filipino textile and mixed-media artist who studied at ESAA Duperré in Paris, and she works with natural fibers such as Philippine abaca and silk as well as recycled materials to explore the interplay between the organic and the synthetic. In series like My Womb Is Your Ocean, she evokes themes of environmental awareness, the fragility of nature, and humanity’s deep reliance on the oceans.
Sally Smith
Sally Smith - is a New Zealand sculptor and artist based on Waiheke Island whose work in bronze and aluminum often draws on motifs from nature and the interplay between negative and positive space. he trained as an architect and practiced in that field for over twenty years before devoting herself fully to art and sculpture. Her work often uses bronze, aluminium and stainless steel, and is characterised by subtle abstraction, detailed craftsmanship, and an interest in how nature and built forms interact.
Sara Al Abdali
Sara Al Abdali - (born in Jeddah in 1989) is a pioneering Saudi Arabian artist and one of the country’s first recognized street artists, whose work fuses graffiti, illustration, ceramics, and traditional Islamic motifs to question urban development and cultural identity. Her art often returns to her Hejazi roots and juxtaposes historical architecture and changing cityscapes to reflect on the tensions between heritage and modernity in Saudi society.
Saule Suleimenova
Saule Suleimenova - is a Kazakh contemporary artist born in 1970 in Almaty, whose work explores collective memory, national identity, and social issues through inventive use of materials like recycled plastic bags, cellophanes, photo archives, gratography and painting. Her series such as “I’m Kazakh and Residual Memory attempt to decolonize Kazakh visual culture by re-processing archival images, everyday materials, and repertoires of Kazakh tradition to reconnect people with suppressed histories and imaginaries.
Savi (咲妃)
Savi (咲妃) - is a Japanese-born artist now based in London whose work fuses contemporary aesthetics with samurai tradition by creating sculptural suits of armor that combine heritage techniques and modern materials. Her pieces explore identity, ritual, and the dialogue between Japanese cultural legacy and global artistic expression.
Sofia Cacciapaglia
Sofia Cacciapaglia - is an Italian painter born in Ponte dell’Olio in 1983, who studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and has lived/worked between Milan, London, and New York. Her work often uses humble “poor” materials like discarded cardboard and packaging paper, transforming them into lush, immersive installations and paintings that evoke gardens, femininity, classical frescoes, and an environmental consciousness.
Selina Scerri
Selina Scerri is a Maltese multimedia artist (born 1980) whose work engages with themes such as domesticity, magic, artificial intelligence, and the uncanny. She studied at Central Saint Martin’s in London and has lived and worked across Europe and Malta, bridging illustration, digital technologies and mystical or symbolic motifs in her practice.