Born and raised in Baghdad, and spending most of his early life between England, United Arab Emirates and Iraq, Ayad Alkadhi was dangerously close to becoming an engineer.

It really was an incredibly close call. He says of the incident, “I always wanted to be a visual artist but it was not an option in Iraq in the early 1990s. So, I chose to study engineering and it was a struggle for me. In retrospect there was a benefit as it trained me to use the other side of my brain. Now I can be a pragmatist when I want and in dreamland when I want. Most of the time, I’m somewhere in between.” *Sigh* Whatta cutie. He may be in between the real world and dreamland, but we are permanently in an Alkadhi-induced daydream.

When Alkadhi reached the tender age of 23, he bailed on Iraq, what with the Gulf War and everything, and moved first to Amman, Jordan, then to Auckland, New Zealand and finally to New York City, where he got his MFA from New York University. He’s been there ever since. Apparently New York has a good art scene or something. Idk.

Alkadhi’s work is a narrative based on his experiences in Iraq and the Middle East. For the most part he is a mixed media artist, employing calligraphy and Arabic newspapers to explain the feels of a Middle Eastern adolescence. In one of these works he translated the words of the song "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen into Arabic and painted them in the shape of a gun strapped to a soldier’s back to critique the fate of unwilling soldiers in Iraq. Alkadhi himself may be in dreamland, but his work is painfully rooted in reality.