There is no single way to define the Emirati woman today. She might be behind a camera, halfway up a mountain, developing a dish in a Sharjah kitchen, preserving the memories of old Abu Dhabi on canvas, building a home for independent cinema, writing the stories of Dubai into poetry, or training for a future mission to space.
For Emirati Women’s Day, we consider achievement in all its forms, celebrating the women expanding what Emirati culture can look like and where it can go. Across art, film, fashion, food, literature, science and sport, they work across vastly different disciplines, connected by a willingness to make space for something that wasn’t there before.
Here are nine Emirati women leaving their mark today, and making what comes next a little more interesting.
Yasmin Al Mulla — Multidisciplinary Designer & Artist
The artist and designer works across fashion, art and design through two distinct practices: her clothing label YNM and Yasmin Al Mulla Design Firm, where she develops bespoke creative projects. Across both, her approach begins with the same question: how can Emirati heritage be carried into something contemporary?
Through YNM, which she co-founded in 2014, Al Mulla has developed a fashion language built around modest dressing and modern interpretations of Khaleeji style. Whether working on a garment, an artwork or a larger design project, Al Mulla’s practice is ultimately about finding new forms for something familiar: allowing Emirati culture to evolve while keeping its identity recognisably intact.
Butheina Kazim — Founder of Cinema Akil
In 2014, the cultural producer founded Cinema Akil as a nomadic cinema, screening films in borrowed spaces across Dubai before establishing its permanent home at Alserkal Avenue in 2018. It became the GCC’s first arthouse cinema, creating an alternative to the commercial multiplex and a dedicated platform for independent, regional and world cinema.
For Kazim, however, the screen has always been only part of the story. Cinema Akil was conceived as a place for people to gather, stay after the credits and talk about what they had just watched. In 2025 alone, Cinema Akil screened more than 200 films from 49 countries, while programmes such as Reel Palestine and Arab Cinema Week continue to give audiences access to cinema they might otherwise never encounter.
Shamma Al Bastaki — Poet & Writer
The poet, writer and artist has built a practice around the details that make up a place: its language, its people, its memories and the stories that risk disappearing between generations. That impulse sits at the heart of her debut poetry collection, House to House. Through poetry, Al Bastaki revisits stories of everyday life around Dubai Creek spanning the 1940s to the 1980s. The multilingual work moves between English and Emirati dialect.
Al Bastaki is also a visual artist, a co-founder of independent publishing collective JARA and a founding member of Untitled Chapters, a literary community created to support Emirati women writers. Her poetry and performances have travelled internationally, most recently to Sicily’s Taobuk literary festival in July 2026.
Nayla Al Khaja — Film Director & Producer
Widely recognised as the UAE’s first female film director, the writer, director and producer has spent more than two decades exploring subjects that sit somewhere between the personal and the socially uncomfortable.
Her debut feature, Three, arrived in cinemas in 2024, drawing on an exorcism Al Khaja witnessed herself, to tell a psychological horror story about family, isolation and the collision between cultural and medical understandings of mental illness. The film followed shorts including Animal and The Shadow, both of which found audiences beyond the UAE.
More recently, Al Khaja has continued down a darker cinematic path with Baab, a psychological drama set in the mountains of Ras Al Khaimah and scored by two-time Academy Award winner A.R. Rahman.
Nora AlMatrooshi — Astronaut & Mechanical Engineer
For Nora AlMatrooshi, space was a childhood dream that never quite went away. She has recalled being in kindergarten when her teacher asked the class to build a tent and imagine it as a spacecraft heading to the Moon. Decades later, in 2021, AlMatrooshi was selected from more than 4,000 applicants for the UAE Astronaut Programme, becoming the first Emirati and Arab woman selected as an astronaut.
Before space entered the picture professionally, AlMatrooshi was already an engineer. A mechanical engineering graduate of United Arab Emirates University, she worked in the oil and gas sector, contributing to major engineering projects before joining the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre. In March 2024, she graduated alongside NASA’s astronaut candidates, earning her astronaut pin and becoming fully qualified for future spaceflight assignments.
Fatima Al Awadhi — Mountaineer
At just 19, Fatima Al Awadhi is already going places few people ever will. The Abu Dhabi-born mountaineer is working towards climbing the Seven Summits, the highest mountain on every continent, with the considerably bigger goal of eventually completing the Explorer’s Grand Slam.
During high school, Al Awadhi joined the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award programme and travelled to Nepal for a trek through the Kathmandu Valley. Somewhere in the Himalayas, she decided she wanted to climb the Seven Summits before turning 20.
She has moved remarkably quickly since. Al Awadhi became the youngest Emirati to summit Mount Elbrus, the youngest Arab to summit Mount Vinson in Antarctica and Carstensz Pyramid in Oceania, and has also climbed Kilimanjaro. Then, in July 2026, she became the first Emirati to summit the 7,134-metre Lenin Peak and the youngest Arab to climb above 7,000 metres, completing the ascent without supplementary oxygen. And she is doing all of this while studying full-time at university.
Almaha Jaralla — Artist & Painter
Almaha Jaralla paints the UAE through memories she didn’t necessarily experience herself. Born and raised in Abu Dhabi, the visual artist turns to family photographs, archival material and oral histories to piece together the everyday life of the Gulf across generations, from family gatherings and beach trips to the houses and neighbourhoods that have disappeared or changed around her.
Family is particularly central to that process. Her 2022 series Shadia retraced the story of her grandmother, who travelled alone from Aden across the Arabian Peninsula in the 1970s, while Seham looked to photographs of her aunt and family life in 1980s Abu Dhabi. Jaralla deliberately softens or obscures the faces in many of these paintings.
Jaralla has described houses as portraits, reading architecture as evidence of how people lived, presented themselves and built communities. In Crude Memory, she turned her attention to Al Ruwais, exploring the architecture, gardens and domestic spaces created alongside the UAE’s rapidly developing oil industry.
Through Jaralla’s work, the grand story of a country changing at extraordinary speed is brought back down to its most intimate scale: the families, homes and ordinary moments that lived through it.
Farah Al Qasimi — Artist & Photographer
Bright, crowded and sometimes deliberately strange, Farah Al Qasimi’s images find meaning in the excess of everyday life, from domestic interiors and beauty rituals to shopping malls, technology and the natural world. Born in Abu Dhabi, Al Qasimi works across photography, film and music, using each to examine ideas around taste, gender, consumer culture and the internet.
Much of her work begins with things that might otherwise be dismissed as ordinary or superficial. Beauty products, patterned furniture, screens and decorative objects become ways of looking at aspiration and the systems that shape how we want to look, live and be perceived. Her photographs are often playful and visually seductive, but underneath that surface is a sharp interest in the social codes embedded in everyday spaces.
Her work sits in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern and the Guggenheim museums in New York and Abu Dhabi, and in 2025 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Yet the Gulf remains an important point of reference in her practice. Al Qasimi has described returning to the UAE after university and beginning to photograph a place she had known her entire life almost as though she were encountering it again.
Moza Almatrooshi — Chef & Multidisciplinary Artist
For Moza Almatrooshi, the kitchen and the artist’s studio have never been entirely separate spaces. The chef, writer and conceptual artist works at the intersection of food, ecology and storytelling, using everything from bread and honey to agricultural practices as a way into larger questions about the land, labour, memory and the mythology of the Arabian Peninsula.
Art came first. Almatrooshi studied at Zayed University before completing an MFA at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. As food became increasingly central to her practice, she took the unusual step of training professionally as a chef, earning a culinary arts diploma from ICCA Dubai and later working in commercial kitchens. Rather than choosing between the two careers, she found a way to make one feed the other.
That intersection now takes perhaps its clearest form in ballad, her experimental culinary initiative housed in Jebal Albalad Cafeteria in Sharjah. Its first season turned familiar ingredients and cafeteria culture into something more considered, with dishes like brown-butter and meshawa omelet parathas alongside collaborations with local artists and artisans.
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