+1 347 327 4033
ayham@ayhamghraowi.com
I am a filmmaker, designer, and writer currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. Through the use of documentary footage, live-action theatrical performances, and computer-generated 3D graphics, my films grapple with the paranoia surrounding the events of war that casts military conflict as an insoluble puzzle.

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 Lecturer and teaching courses on film, video art, 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.
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.
2024
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.
2024
Moving Bodies
Course
Course2024
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.
2024
I was invited by Yale Norfolk School of Art co-directors Lisa Sigal and Byron Kim to present an artist talk on June 13 as part of their public lecture program organized around the theme of "Making Light". Following the presentation, I taught a workshop on performance, video, and chroma key post-production.
2024
In summer 2024, my film Abjectly Yours—a restaging of a Marx Brothers vaudeville routine as an allegory for spectatorship, surveillance, and the weaponized gaze—was installed at the Deutsches Filminstitut and Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany.
2024
I was invited by the UCLA Department of Art to give a talk on May 24th as part of their Visiting Artist Lecture Series.
2024
Too Much for a Send Up
Essay
Essay2023
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.
2023
Thomas Elsaesser Collection
Project
Project2023
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.
2023
Navigable Graphics
Course
Course2022
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.
2022
Dance Dance Rebellion
Essay
Essay2021
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”.
2021
On the Politics of Simulation
Weird-Ass Visual Podcast
Weird-Ass Visual Podcast2020
What happens to the art at the museum at night? During the corona-related shutdown in November 2020, Hito Steyerl’s exhibition I Will Survive at K21 (September 26, 2020—January 10, 2021) transformed into a livestream format and "weird-ass visual podcast". On November 15th, I took part in “4 Nights at the Museum,”—a project developed by Hito Steyerl that provided some background and conversations about the works in the exhibition. I joined Hito Steyerl and Shintaro Miyazaki, junior professor in Digital Media and Computation at Humboldt University of Berlin, in a discussion on the politics of simulation.
2020
The Artist Collective Summer School
Summer School
Summer School2019
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.’
2019
In 2019, I was invited by Tom Eccles, Park Avenue Armory Visual Arts Curator and Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, to join a panel with Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, and Christopher B. Toepfer—founder of The Neighborhood Foundation and the protagonist of Steyerl's film The City of Broken Windows. The panel discussed Drill—Hito Steyerl's film installed at the Park Avenue Armory for which I served as Assistant Director in addition to my role as Producer of the exhibition.
2019
I was asked by artist and designer Karel Martens and Marius Schwarz, guest-editor of the architecture journal OASE, to contribute an essay to its 100th issue dedicated to reflecting on Martens’ 28 years as the designer of the journal. The essay focused on Martens’ continuously evolving collaborative strategies in the production of the journal’s design as a way to illustrate the social function of his typographic and material experimentations.
2018
Yale School of Art Press
Press
Press2018
In 2018, I started the Yale School of Art Press for which I served as editor and art director for publications that were developed in relation to the public programs. The publications integrated the school’s discourse into a varied series of printed books and digital publications. The series played an integral role within the school to document workshops, talks, and student work, as well in providing the school of art with a broader reach as it extended the distributions of the publications across the country and internationally.
2018
Queens International
Project
Project2016
In Summer 2016, I served as the creative director for 2016 Queens International—the Queens Museum Biennial which that year looked to the idea of thresholds, and the way such spaces for transition, contact, and exchange become markers for shaping the politics of borders. In lieu of outsourcing the print production of the catalog, I developed the identity of the biennial to revolve around developing a new publishing model and distribution strategy that used a risograph printer purchased by the museum for the biennial. Within the museum, a production space was set up as a public studio and workshop where I edited and designed the catalog with material authored over the course of the exhibition.
2016