About
Sama Waham is an Iraqi-Canadian director, cinematographer, and media artist whose work moves fluidly between hybrid documentary, experimental fiction, and expanded cinema—employing image, myth, and fragmented memory to interrogate questions of exile, belonging, and justice.
Rooted in the landscapes of displacement, Waham’s films weave together lived testimony and myth to reveal how personal and collective histories reverberate across generations. Her practice often engages with disability justice, the poetics of fragmentation, and the aftermath of war and protest. Through these intersecting lenses, she reimagines buried archives and oral traditions as cinematic acts of resistance and remembrance.
Sama Waham’s body of work critically examines how film and media art can confront erasure, reclaim marginalized narratives, and articulate diasporic subjectivities within contemporary visual culture—pushing the boundaries of political cinema and expanding the ways it can render agency through form and affect.
Her most recent feature, Ki~Bé~Giš (2025), premiered at the Camden International Film Festival and continues its international festival run. The film—a hybrid documentary rooted in Iraq’s 2019 uprising—reawakens a forgotten fable of revolt through the eyes of exile. Her earlier works, including Sing for Me (2015), Resight (2013), and Ramp (2013), have screened at festivals and galleries across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, often accompanied by public discussions on displacement, gender, and the politics of representation.
Waham is currently developing two new projects: a work of expanded cinema that extends her exploration of multi-layered, fragmented storytelling, and a feature-length fiction film examining grief and ritual through an account of displacement and cultural dissonance—interrogating how mourning and adaptation intersect within diasporic experience. Her artistic and scholarly practice are united by an inquiry into how poetic and hybrid forms can operate as critical methodologies—foregrounding justice, memory, and renewal through experimental modes of cinematic expression.
She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where she teaches directing, cinematography, expanded cinema, and new narrative forms.