Riham Isaac

Riham Isaac is a performance artist from Palestine whose practice weaves together movement, voice, objects, video, and sound to create live and multidisciplinary performance work across theatre, public space, installations, and site-specific contexts. Through themes of gender, politics, resistance, societal dynamics, and collective imagination, she tells stories often misrepresented, challenging prevailing perceptions, embracing risk-taking, and provoking change within audiences.

She co-directed The Alternativity with Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle and Banksy, broadcast as a BBC2 documentary. She created Stone on Road (2014, Qalandia International Biennale), a performance happening in the streets of Ramallah. She premiered Another Lover's Discourse ليه خلّتني أحبك at the Belfast International Arts Festival, commissioned as part of their 2022 60th-anniversary celebration, and nominated as Show of the Week at VAULT Festival 2023. The work toured six major UK venues in 2023.

Riham is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Practice at the University of Exeter, where her research explores embodied archival practice and performance as a site of resistance and land liberation. She is driven by the question of how Palestinian land might be performed in moments of urgency and crisis, and is deeply invested in how performance can deepen our understanding of land injustices and bridge activism with its transformative potential. Despite dispossession, displacement, and systematic violations of the land, many Palestinians carry it in their memories, their relationship to their bodies, and their daily practices — rendering performance a significant and essential site for the representation of that Palestinian land.

Riham holds an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths and has taught at Palestinian universities. She has collaborated with the A.M. Qattan Foundation, the British Council, and numerous international institutions. She has been recognised through fellowships with Georgetown University's Global Lab for Performance and Politics and IETM as a Global Connector (2024).