Artists

Passant El-Sayed

Passant El-Sayed is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and performer based in Cairo. With a background in archaeology, she transitioned from theater to contemporary dance, filmmaking, and acting. Her work explores the intersections of body, memory, and trauma, examining how identities are embodied. Embracing experimentation, she views art as a unified field where movement, photography, and color converge. Her practice centers on movement-based storytelling and somatic liberation, treating life as an artistic process. During a residency in Mauritius, she developed research, led workshops, and performed. Through stage, lens, or canvas, she creates visceral works that free the body and give voice to inner experience.

Passant El-Sayed

Artists in Residency: 2nd Cohort of 2026

From February 16th to March 9th 2026, Tilal AiR welcomes nine artists from diverse backgrounds, brought together for its February cohort. Selected through the open call launched in November 2025, their projects were reviewed by an international jury composed of Abdramane Kamate, Divya Bhatia, and Rasha Salah. 

Over three weeks, the residency becomes a living laboratory. The artists develop their research in a setting conducive to experimentation and dialogue, alternating between individual work periods, collective gatherings, and exchanges with the local context. This rhythm fosters the deepening of personal approaches while opening spaces for shared reflection. 

Through the diversity of practices — visual arts, writing, performance, and transdisciplinary research — this new cohort embodies the spirit of Tilal AiR: to create rigorous yet caring working conditions where situated narratives, contemporary imaginaries, and relationships with the living intersect and mutually enrich one another. 

Through this program, Tilal AiR reaffirms its commitment to emerging artistic processes and to the international circulation of knowledge, by supporting modes of transmission, collaboration, and local anchoring that extend beyond the timeframe of the residency. 

Artists in Residency: 2nd Cohort of 2026