Working across video and performance, I explore how visibility becomes entangled with the politics of appeal, refusal, and opacity—particularly under the voyeuristic demands of the global image economy. Combining documentary and found footage with live performance and computer-generated animation, my work examines how constructed images, through their absurdity, parody, and artifice, can function as forms of evidence within the unstable conditions of witnessing. Recent projects address CIA programs training psychics for remote targeting, Israel’s expanding surveillance network in the West Bank, and the drone of diesel generators across Damascus, Syria amid its deepening energy crisis.

I have taught studios, seminars, and workshops at the Department of Architecture at Cornell AAP, the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Yale School of Art where I am currently Critic and teaching courses on video art, performance studies, and artist writing.

While at Yale School of Art, I also served as the Assistant Dean for Research and Public Projects from 2017–2019. As Assistant Dean, I developed Critical Practice as an emerging area of study, while also organizing new initiatives, workshops, and programs as they related to all school, university, and broader cooperations, nationally and internationally.

I am currently based in Brooklyn, NY and New Haven, Connecticut. I can be reached at ayham@ayhamghraowi.com.

Walk Cycles (2024, 2:37 min.) is a film that examines how walking becomes a site of performance, suspicion, and survival under drone surveillance.

On December 3rd, I gave a talk at Dronomation: Post-Civil Drones and Artificial “Intelligence” in War Zones—an online conference at AdBK Munich that looks to present contemporary critiques of drone-technologies, their scopic regimes and increasing reliance on so-called AI systems. Instead of fetishizing the presumed autonomy of these weapons, this conference looks at the logistic dependencies, the operational chains of humans, and the infrastructural layers that enable them; as well as their relation to cinematic technologies.

Our House by Madness (2024, 15:16 min) presents a constellation of images drawn from the war in Gaza, displayed across a cluster of charging iPhones. The film opens with the 1982 pop song “Our House” by the British ska band Madness—a nostalgic anthem of domestic life— before cutting to cellphone footage of a family’s home in Gaza, that was bulldozed by the IDF in February 2024.

I was invited by the UCLA Department of Art to give a talk on May 24th, 2024 as part of their Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

Moving Bodies—titled after an unfinished project by the filmmaker Harun Farocki—is a graduate seminar I created and currently teach at Yale School of Art. The course offers an introduction to contemporary debates in media theory through an interrogation of imaging technologies and their mediation and management of the body.

The Artist Collective Summer School is a London-based program I produced as Assistant Dean of Research and Public Projects at Yale School of Art in collaboration with Mark Hallett, Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre, and Richard Birkett, Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The summer program was hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre in cooperation with Yale School of Art and ICA London, as well as the Yale Art History Department and the Yale Center for British Art. Taking place over 12 days in July 2019, the summer school provided an opportunity for graduate students from Yale School of Art as well as the Yale History of Art Department to join UK-based peers and other members of the UK’s art community in participating in a series of day-long workshops and seminars led by art historians, curators, critics, and artists around the central theme of ‘artist collectives.’

The artist Mathew Zefeldt asked me to contribute an essay to a catalog of his work. The publication features his recent hyperrealist paintings of simulated worlds informed directly by the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V. Through first-person gameplay, my essay Too Much for A Sendup critiques GTA V’s claim to satire while calling into question the video game’s graphical surplus in it's endless pursuit of computer generated realism.

Navigable Graphics is a course I created and first taught at Virignia Commonwealth University. The studio addresses the point-of-view imaging technique that has come to define contemporary interface design. Taking as a point of departure the construction of first-person perspective in the history of cinema, the course goes on to examine the retooling of the controllable, subjective camera view in navigable graphics.

On the occasion of Hito Steyerl’s 2021 exhibition “I Will Survive” displayed at both the Centre Pompidou and the K21 Düsseldorf, I was asked by the institutions to contribute a catalog essay that offers context to “Social Sim”, a new video installation by the artist. Published by Spector Books, the essay Dance Dance Rebellion explores how the demand for information during social unrest manifests as repetitive body movement—whether it be the synchronized “doomscrolling” of a news app, the rhythmic button-pressing of video-game play, or a “dancing mania”.

I was invited by artist and filmmaker Savaş Boyraz to give a presentation and lead a seminar on December 4th in his course Film as Artistic Research: Aesthetics of Resistance at Stockholm University of the Arts. The course aims to explore artistic research as a method that existed in various politically engaged film practices around the world over the 20th century.

In 2023, with designer Matt Wolff, I produced the web-based research archive for Thomas Elsaesser—one of the founding figures of film studies as a discipline. It was a collaboration I had started with Thomas before his untimely death in 2019. I continued to oversee its completion in cooperation with the Deutsches Filminstitut and Filmmuseum, which now holds his working archive, consisting of more than 400 boxes of documents, books, videotapes, as well as digital files. Thomas’ many books and more than 200 essays on Hollywood melodrama, Weimar cinema, media archaeology, and early cinema before 1915 as well as chronicles of German filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Harun Farocki, and Alexander Kluge, established him as a leading figure in film criticism. I worked closely with Ellen M. Harrington, Director of the DFF, researcher Alo Paistik, and Thomas’ widow, Professor Silvia Vega-Llona to establish the website as a publicly accessible archive of his work and the first step towards a dedicated research center at the DFF in honor of Thomas Elsaesser’s legacy.

A Spoon is a Stone (2025, 4:54 min.) is set in Hebron—an intensely militarized and surveilled zone in the West Bank, and widely regarded as one of the most monitored cities globally. The film examines the politics of vision under Israeli occupation, where seeing becomes an act of subjugation that turns the image into a site of struggle. Told through the voice of a surveillance camera developing a conscience, the narration slips from mechanical observation into doubt—fractured by uncertainty and moral tension.