How Gaida AlMogren’s Curatorial Vision is Shaping Saudi Art & Design
Discover how Gaida AlMogren, Artistic Director of Noor Riyadh and founder of Cultural Crossroads, advances Saudi art with Ithra and beyond.
Curator
"Architecture is never just walls. It’s a language of who we are."
As Artistic Director of Noor Riyadh, one of the world’s largest light art festivals, Gaida AlMogren is transforming the Saudi capital into a city of luminous encounters. From 2023 through 2025, her curatorial vision has turned Riyadh into an open-air gallery, where stories are told not just on canvas but across buildings, skies, and streets.
Under her artistic leadership, Noor Riyadh has evolved beyond a festival of spectacle into a layered cultural narrative. Every installation is a point of connection between people and place, heritage and innovation, the seen and the felt.
A Life Built in Layers
Before becoming a key figure in Saudi’s curatorial landscape, Gaida AlMogren trained and practiced as an interior architect. She holds an MFA in Interior Architecture and Design from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and a Bachelor of Interior Architecture from King Faisal University. Her early work shaped high-end residential, commercial, and hospitality projects both in the Kingdom and abroad.
She co-founded Athel Architectural Consultancy, through which she has led projects in Paris, Dubai, London, and across Saudi Arabia. Alongside her design practice, Gaida has advised and curated art collections for private individuals, commercial spaces, and design agencies throughout North and South America, experience that informs her refined curatorial eye. She is also a contributing writer to various arts and culture publications, offering insights on design, identity, and the cultural landscape of the Gulf.
The Shift Toward Curation
These multidisciplinary experiences led her into curation, not as a departure from architecture, but as its emotional extension. She began to see exhibitions as spaces of memory, as environments that invite us to feel something larger than aesthetics. This shift allowed her to draw on her architectural discipline while creating experiences that stir cultural reflection, connection, and introspection.
"My vision for the Kingdom's cultural sector is for it to become a magnet for art and artists, a global platform for cultural dialogue and creative exchange, and to occupy a leading cultural position among its counterparts worldwide."
The Dialogue Between Space and Identity
Gaida’s architectural background gives her a structural fluency that deeply informs her curatorial voice. She doesn’t simply place works in galleries, but constructs environments that extend and expand their meaning. Whether she’s transforming a domestic space into an emotional archive or animating a public square with light, her spaces become dynamic conversations between the viewer and the cultural subconscious.
Her curatorial work often highlights the intangible: scent, memory, silence, and trace. This intangible dimension reflects a broader truth in her philosophy, that culture is not just what is made, but what is remembered.
Cultural Crossroads: Documenting the Intangible
Beyond Noor Riyadh, Gaida is also the founder of Cultural Crossroads, a research-based digital project across web and social channels, devoted to showcasing the creativity and culture of Saudi Arabia to the world. In many ways, it’s an extension of her curatorial ethos: a space to gather, reflect, and connect across disciplines and generations.
The platform serves as a living archive of contemporary expression, but also as a research hub that foregrounds the often-overlooked voices in the cultural ecosystem. It is both mirror and map, reflecting where Saudi culture stands today, and tracing where it might go next.
Deserts & Sea: A Dual Landscape of Memory and Motion
In November 2025, Gaida AlMogren curated Deserts & Sea, the first solo exhibition in Saudi Arabia by Bahraini artist Sheikha Hala Al Khalifa. Held in Riyadh and attended by key dignitaries, the show explored the deep connection between two elemental landscapes, the desert and the sea, presenting them not as opposites but as spiritual and historical mirrors shaped by migration, trade, and resilience.
Through Gaida’s curatorial lens, the exhibition became a reflection on belonging. In a city rooted in the desert yet drawn to the sea, Deserts & Sea invited visitors to consider how these environments shape identity, memory, and the journeys that define us.
Echoes of Home: Ithra’s "Echoes of the Familiar"
In 2025, Gaida curated one of her most personal exhibitions at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra): Echoes of the Familiar. Bringing together 28 Saudi artists, the show reimagined “home” as a feeling shaped by memory, ritual, and sensory experience. Visitors moved through spaces filled with familiar echoes, children’s footsteps in a hallway, the scent of cardamom in a kitchen, and a bedroom layered with dreams, fears, and generational hope.
Gaida’s own journey, growing up in Sharqiya, spending 16 years abroad, and returning to a transformed landscape, deeply shaped the curatorial vision. She spoke of losing the “whispers in the walls” that once anchored her sense of place. That longing for rootedness and continuity became the emotional core of the exhibition, inviting audiences to reconnect with the textures of their domestic pasts and build new shared cultural memories.
"I’m working really hard to create these rituals and these things for my children to have that feeling of home.”
Riyadh Art Week: Lift Gallery’s "Passages"
In April 2025, Gaida AlMogren also curated Passages: From the Heritage of the Past to the Horizons of the Future, a bold, immersive exhibition at Lift Gallery for Riyadh Art Week. Bringing together the vibrant visual language of international artist Bradley Theodore with four distinguished Saudi artists, Nasser AlTurki, Hmoud AlAttawi, Dr. Saad Howede, and Fahad AlNaymah. The exhibition explored liminality: those transitional spaces where past, present, and future converge.
Passages was not merely a show of artworks; it was a spatial narrative. Using color blocking, patterns, and symbolic storytelling, the works reflected the ongoing transformation of Saudi Arabia. Gaida’s curatorial direction invited viewers to move through this evolving cultural arc, offering moments of pause, reflection, and anticipation. With this exhibition, she turned Lift Gallery into a portal, a threshold between memory and vision, anchored in both history and aspiration.
A Career Rooted in Vision
Across all her work, from directing city-wide festivals to curating intimate gallery shows, Gaida remains committed to a single idea: that art must engage. It must move, evoke, and belong to the public. She often speaks of the "intangible values" within each piece, a belief that behind every object lies a deeper story, shaped by culture, place, and time. Her designs and exhibitions aren’t just seen, but felt.
A Legacy in Story and Space
In a pivotal era where Saudi Arabia is reimagining its place on the global cultural map, Gaida AlMogren stands as a visionary translator of heritage into future-facing narratives. Her curatorial practice shapes how a nation remembers, reflects, and reaches forward. By weaving architecture, memory, and meaning into every project, she is quietly building a cultural legacy defined not by spectacle, but by depth. Her work reminds us that transformation is never just about progress. It’s about anchoring identity within that momentum.
Gaida’s spaces don’t only open doors. They open conversations, evoke memory, and invite return. In every threshold she constructs, there’s an echo of who we were, who we are, and who we’re becoming.
Inspired by Gaida AlMogren?
Explore more artist stories that shape Saudi culture at KSA Art.