Wafaa Bilal
American artist · United States · On the map · Artists · Born 1966 · age 60
Dr. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi American artist, a former professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently an art professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
Wafaa Bilal is read about 13 times a day, in 9 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 10 July 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
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About this person
He is a Creative Capital Award winner in 2021 for his project In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA and named one of Foreign Policy magazine's Leading 100 Global Thinkers in 2016 for his work as an advocate. Bilal's work, Canto III, was included as part of the Iranian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Bilal's current work 168:01 brings awareness to cultural destruction and promotes the collective healing process through education and audience participation. He is best known for his work, Domestic Tension, a performance piece in which he lived in a gallery for a month and was shot by paintballs remotely by internet users watching from a webcam and for his book, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life, and Resistance under the Gun, based on that performance, which details the horrors of living in a conflict zone and growing up under Saddam Hussein's regime. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was conferred an honorary Ph.D. from DePauw University.
