Bassem Yousri (based between Cairo and Berlin) is an Egyptian visual artist and filmmaker whose mixed-media installations and experimental films look closely, and often with humor, at the objects, surfaces, and gestures of everyday public life — and at the forms of authority they quietly carry. He also translates art texts from English to Arabic and is an art educator.
His films move between documentary and fiction — among them The Wardrobe Man (2018) — and he is currently completing Film Romancy, a feature that reassembles a romantic-comedy workshop he was filming in Cairo when the 2011 revolution interrupted it.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Centre Pompidou and l’Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Sharjah Art Foundation; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; BOZAR, Brussels; Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; and IVAM, Valencia; and is held in the collection of the State Museum of Egyptian Art, Munich. He holds an MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University (2009) and a BFA from Helwan University, Cairo (2003), and has taught widely, including as Associate Professor of Practice in Visual Arts at the American University in Cairo (2023–2025).
