Collection: Sara Sudanese

Sara Sudanese is a Sudanese artist and art director whose practice moves between painting, drawing and cinema. Across these forms, she explores identity, memory, belief and the inherited narratives through which we understand ourselves and the worlds around us.

Born in 1985 and raised between Saudi Arabia and Sudan, Awad graduated in Fine Art from Sudan University in 2006 before completing a Higher Diploma in Folklore at the University of Khartoum. Myth, cultural memory and questions of displacement remain central to her work, alongside an interest in beauty and its opposites, contradiction, power and the ways identity is both inherited and constructed.

Awad’s visual-art practice is closely connected to an accomplished career in film. As an art director and set designer, she has helped shape the visual worlds of internationally recognised productions including You Will Die at Twenty (2019), winner of the Lion of the Future Award at the Venice International Film Festival; Al-Sit (2020), which went on to receive numerous international awards; and Mohamed Kordofani’s Goodbye Julia (2023), recipient of the Freedom Prize at Cannes. More recently, she served as art director on the Saudi feature Alzarrfa, released in 2025.

That movement between the painted image and the constructed cinematic space is an important part of Awad’s approach. Composition, atmosphere, symbolism and storytelling operate across both practices, each offering a different means of examining what lies beneath the visible surface.

Her solo exhibitions include Al-Duroob at the Rashid Diab Arts Centre in 2014 and Leili in Addis Ababa in 2019. Throughout her work runs a sense of continual enquiry: art not as a fixed conclusion, but as a means of questioning, reinterpreting and beginning again.