About
A career that follows the work.
Omar Shoukri is an artistic director, educator and doctoral researcher whose practice sits at the intersection of broadcast media production, exhibition and academic design. Drawing on his experience in television and at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, he developed a successful music performance course at NYU Abu Dhabi that allowed students to showcase their work across NYUAD events and open studios. He is, by formation and conviction, a professor in practice.
Born in Stuttgart, he began his career at SAT.1 regional national television, working across short- and long-form series, reports and documentary films before the work took him across continents — Los Angeles (Admusic), Berlin (Arte), Dubai (MBC, where he contributed to "The Investor" - the region's The Apprentice, and to the acclaimed Ramadan travel series "Khawater"), New York (McKinsey & Co.) and London (CNN International & BBC Arabic). In Abu Dhabi he served as assistant director and managed post-production on a National Geographic production in collaboration with ADEK. He has delivered corporate media training across the Middle East with the BBC Academy, and led adult learning and public education initiatives in Germany in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and GIZ.
As an exhibiting artist, his film The Water in Ourselves (2016) has been presented at the Transart Institute in Berlin and New York, NYUAD Institute, Imagine Science Film Festival Abu Dhabi and the Goethe-Institut Barcelona. His directorial debut Three Short Tales of Forgiveness (2019) — a NYU Abu Dhabi production — received worldwide festival participation across Germany, the United Kingdom, the UAE, India and the United States. At NYU Abu Dhabi he served as technical instructor and event manager, mentoring students from eighty nationalities. He now teaches across three Bachelor programmes at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi, where his installation Echoes of Digital Waters — a generative work responding to the competition theme 'Into the Blue' and to the mark-making of Cy Twombly — was selected as a national winner for exhibition at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in September 2026.
He is currently pursuing doctoral research at the European Graduate School on Expressive Arts and Generative AI in Societal Transformation and Learning — asking what creative practice can do in conditions of technological and social rupture.
