Meet the Artist Bringing a Mobile Studio to Every Corner of the UAE

Five minutes from the Saudi Arabian border, in the far reaches of Al Dhafra, a truck pulls into a community that rarely sees visitors. Inside are brushes, canvases and paint made from expired coffee grounds and traditional Emirati spices. Within the hour, families, elders and teenagers who have never picked up a paintbrush are learning to mix colour from the same materials their ancestors once used to decorate saddles and cooking tools.

This is Kenaz Art Studio, the UAE's first mobile art platform, and its founder has already logged more than 10,000 kilometres bringing it to communities across the country.

Ghaleya Almansoori did not set out to build a national project. She set out to understand why she loved art, and to figure out what to do with that love. "I love people appreciating art," she said. "This is exactly the total aim for Kenaz, appreciation of art. Art is everything around us, and I really loved art since I was a young girl."

That early love led her to a bachelor's degree in fine arts at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, and later to a master's in art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a program she describes as demanding far more than technical skill. "They don't just teach you to do nice paintings," she said. "They want you to talk more about the impact projects that you are doing." In her application, before she had ever set foot in the program, she wrote that she intended to change something in the field of art. Kenaz was already forming in her mind.

Her classmates, drawn from India, China, Mexico and elsewhere, listened as she described the scale of what she wanted to build. "Everyone was like, wow, this is a very huge project," she recalled. "It needs a huge governmental entity. Everyone was doubting in a very kind and nice way, but I was very into it."

She graduated in the summer of 2023. By January 11th, 2024, less than six months later, Kenaz was launched.

Almansoori secured the licenses, designed the truck and built the program from the ground up. "That's how passionate I was about it," she said. "I knew exactly the directions. I knew how to make it and how to do it."

The studio's mission is built around access. Workshops are free, funded through partnerships with government and private entities across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah. "We don't want to be in a place where people are paying," Almansoori said, "because our whole idea is to make it accessible for people." Programming ranges from candle-making inspired by oud and amber to carpentry, design and painting, with an emphasis on turning traditional crafts into skills participants can eventually build into small businesses.

The painting workshops draw the most attention. Rather than watercolour or acrylic, participants work with pigments made from used coffee grounds and Emirati spices, learning both a painting technique and the vocabulary of the ingredients themselves. It is a practice rooted in how earlier generations made do without art supply stores, adapted here from handicraft to canvas. "For our ancestors, they used the plants to paint the handicrafts," Almansoori said. "But for us, we paint with it."

Almansoori has also watched assumptions about who the studio serves shift over time. Kenaz was initially mistaken for a children's activity. "Everyone thinks art is just for kids," she said. "It's for the whole family. It's for the adults and elders, even more than the kids." She has come to see the workshops as something closer to therapy for the adults who attend, many of whom arrive hesitant to pick up a brush at all. "They are afraid of touching their brush," she said. "We are going to be with you step by step, and that's going to change your view of art."

There is no fixed route for where Kenaz goes next. Almansoori describes the schedule as something that assembles itself, shaped by invitations from schools, festivals and government entities that hear about the project and ask for it directly. "The schedule just prepared itself by itself," she said. "We saw the demand, and we are very happy and honoured that people are reaching out."

Asked where the studio is headed, she resists giving a fixed answer. "It's a journey, to be honest," she said. "Every time we meet someone new, we meet a different community. It makes Kenaz a whole journey, and that's exactly how art is. Art is a journey. You learn through the process, and it's always going to take you to another step, but you are not done there."