Hanaa Malallah was born in 1958 in Thi Qar Province, Iraq. She studied under the guidance of Iraq’s ‘Pioneer’ generation of artists, including Faik Hassan and Shakir Hassan al Said, who were instrumental in bringing western modernism to the country. In the 1990s she began to teach, lecturing at the Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad. She later became the director of the Graphics Department in Institute of Fine Arts and remained in that post until she left Iraq in 2006 after receiving death threats from militias. Upon leaving Iraq, she held an artist residency at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, after which she was awarded a fellowship by S.O.A.S. in London in 2008. Following this, she was invited to take up a fellowship at the Chelsea College of Art in London for three years. She is currently based between London and Manama, where she is associate professor of art at the Royal University for Women, Bahrain. Solo exhibitions include Baghdad: Geography People Symbols, Centre for Arts, Baghdad (1993) and Vivid Ruins, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2009). Group exhibitions include Contemporary Iraqi Art, Institute du Monde Arabe, Paris (2000); Tawashujat: Between Poet and Artists, The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman (2003); Iraqi Artists in Exile, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston (2008-2009) and Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11, Imperial War Museum, London (2017).  Her works are in major museums and collections worldwide, including the Royal Jordanian Museum, the British Museum, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and Barjeel Art Foundation.