Born in 1976, Cairo. Lives in Cairo.

Doa Aly is interested in society's economy of role-play, the use of different types of behaviour and how these vary depending on different situations and contexts. The shift between the subjective and projected image, as well as the gestures of chosen and prescribed roles is her favourite artistic subject. The artist traces so-called 'modern misfits', individuals whose actions and constant struggle for identity lead to an ambiguous, yet productive state. Her video works tend to refer to fictional characters either created by the artist herself or found in literature (William Blake, Guy de Maupassant, Wilhelm Jensen). In these stories, the human body expresses the conflict of moving from the old self to the new one.
Doa Aly's video The Girl Splendid in Walking (2009), is based on Russian folk tales, a novel by Wilhelm Jensen called Gradiva, A Pompeiian Fancy (1918), and a short story 'The Compass Girl' written by Aly. Famously analysed in Freud's study 'Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva', the archaic story is chosen by the artist for its ready-made sensuality and obsessiveness. Told from the perspective of a female protagonist, the video is a story about obsessions and unrequited love, longing and desire, frustration and sensuality, the desire to communicate that ends up being mimetic of the other.