Soniya Ahmed is a Kurdish artist based in Scotland whose practice has developed across painting, mixed media and illustration. Art has been a constant throughout her life, beginning in childhood in Kurdistan and continuing to develop after moving to the UK.

She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, before completing a Master of Letters at the Glasgow School of Art, where her practice developed alongside a deeper exploration of art, philosophy, identity and the relationship between our inner and outer worlds.

Much of Ahmed’s work has grown from an exploration of her own past, returning to memory, place, cultural identity and the experience of belonging between different worlds. Rather than simply documenting these experiences, she uses art as a way of examining how the past continues to exist within the present and how memory, history and place contribute to our understanding of who we are.

For more than a decade, Ahmed has worked professionally as an artist, with her work exhibited internationally across the UK, Europe and Asia. Her work has been shown at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, in Paris and Glasgow, alongside commissions and published work including cover artwork for Cambridge University Press and the University of Edinburgh.

Her long-standing interest in the emotional and psychological dimensions of art has also led her into the field of Art Psychotherapy. She is currently undertaking a Master’s in Art Psychotherapy at University, bringing together her experience as a practising artist with a developing therapeutic understanding of creativity, expression and the inner world.

Across both areas of her practice, art remains at the centre. Her work continues to explore memory, identity, belonging, freedom, place and human experience particularly the things that can be deeply felt but are not always easily expressed through words.

For Ahmed, art exists between what is visible and what is carried within.