Umarah Rahim

Umarah Abdul Rahim is an India-born visual artist working across staged photography, videography, and publication design. Her practice examines the architectures of human emotion and the political conditions that shape them, moving between intimate domestic registers and broader structural critique. Drawing from the visual languages of documentary, fiction, and the archive, she constructs narratives that interrogate gender, inheritance, and the quiet violences embedded in everyday life—situating personal testimony within wider histories of region, religion, and resistance.

A BFA graduate of RIT's School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, Umarah is an incoming MFA candidate in Visual Arts at Columbia University. She has contributed as a photographer to news outlets and publications and served as an Archivist at CEPA Gallery. These engagements have shaped a practice attentive to the ethics of representation, the labor of looking, and the role of the image as both document and proposition.