I’m Migrant: Afifa Aleiby - Episode 3 of Yamam Nabeel’s multimedia project in which he pieces together his heritage through interviews, portraits and conversations with exiled Iraqi artists, writers, and intellectuals. In this a deeply personal project, Yamam shares the Iraq he missed out on, as the young son of exiled Iraqi poet Nabeel Yasin, a parallel Iraq created by these artists he grew up with in Europe, through analogue film portraits and a film documentary series, as well as original artwork and installations.

Afifa Aleiby was born in Basra, Iraq in 1953. After finishing school, she moved to Baghdad to study at the Fine Arts Institute, while working as an illustrator for a newspaper.

In 1974 she received a scholarship to stud Monumental Art at the renowned Surikov Institute in Moscow. During the 1980's she lived in Rome and Florence in Italy and briefly taught at the Fine Arts Institute in Aden, Yemen before moving and settling in the Netherlands in the late 1990's.

She has lived in exile since leaving Iraq for Moscow, and returned to her homeland for the first time in 2004. She lives and works near The Hague in the Netherlands.