Hagar Masoud

Areas of Specialization: Interdisciplinary art, storytelling, installation, video, Artificial intelligence (AI), and extended reality

Email: Hagar.Masoud@stonybrook.edu
Website:TBA

Hagar Masoud is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, scholar, and storyteller who draws from her Cairo roots to inform her work. Her research-based practice incorporates sound art, sculpture, installation, video, technology such as Artificial intelligence (AI), and extended reality. Masoud investigates questions of gentrification, childhood trauma, and collective memory to reflect on their effect on the body. Her work negotiates on the way the body, sexuality, gender, place, trauma, and violence intersect in the aftermath of such horrors. By adopting new media and oral history as methodologies, Masoud re-contextualizes socio-political commentary and cultural transformations.

Hagar Masoud’s current practice has had a focus on the violent and oppressive practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), which refers to the non-medical, ritual removal of external female genitalia. It is typically performed on girls between infancy and adolescence, often without their consent, and is considered a patriarchal instrument to dominate girls' sexuality and a violation of human rights. FGM is practiced in many countries across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as among certain immigrant communities around the world. It is rooted in cultural beliefs surrounding femininity, purity, marriageability, and control over women's sexuality.

Many of Masoud’s pieces, such as Behind the Walls, are multimedia installations and socially engaged projects which aim to raise awareness about the physical and emotional pain inflicted on these girls. She seeks to highlight the urgent need to end this practice and protect the bodily autonomy of girls worldwide.

Hagar Masoud is currently pursuing her MFA in Art at SUNY Stony Brook University. She lives and works between Cairo and New York. She is a Fellow of Montalvo Art Center in California (2023) and Art Omi in New York (2022).