Dr Omniya Abdel Barr

Digitising the K.A.C Creswell International Collections

I am an architect and historian of Islamic art and architecture. I hold a PhD on Islamic history from Provence University, Aix-Marseille (2015), with a thesis titled: ‘L’art urbain du Caire Mamlouk, manières de faire et enjeux sociaux’, an MSc in Conservation from the KUL, Leuven (2004) and a BSc in Architecture from the Fine Arts of Helwan University (2000). In 2014, I joined the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation (EHRF) and became their Head of Development, launching projects centred around cultural heritage rescue and documentation. I am also interested in the documentation of technical skills in traditional woodwork.

At the V&A, I am leading a digitisation project on the photographs of K.A.C Creswell (1879-1974) of Islamic architecture, in collaboration with the Ashmolean Museum, the Fine Arts Library of I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, and the American University in Cairo. This project is providing better accessibility to Creswell’s photographs for students, researchers and the general public. I co-curated the first Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2023, co-directed the INTO Withstanding Change project at Bayt al-Razzaz in Cairo (2022–2024) and directed the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation project Rescuing the Mamluk Minbars of Cairo (2018–2020).

Selected  publications

‘The Mamluk Minbars of Cairo: History, Heritage and Risks’ in Trevathan, I. (ed.), Mosque: Approaches to Art and Architecture, Routledge, 2024, pp. 175-188

‘Revisiting the K.A.C. Creswell photographs of Islamic architecture’ in Edwards, E. and Ravilious, E. (eds), What Photographs Do: the making and remaking of museum cultures, V&A Publishing /UCL Press, 2022, pp. 201–12

‘Building Mamluk Cairo, the Capital of a Sultanate, in al-Sayyad, N. (ed.) Routledge Handbook on Cairo: Histories, Representations and Discourses, Routledge, 2022, pp.45-65.

Barr, O.A. and El Kady, G., ‘Spatial Planning in Egypt, in Light of Heritage’, in CAL / Collective for Architecture Lebanon (ed.), Architecture of the Territory: Constructing National Narratives in the Arab World, Beirut, 2022, pp. 303–22

Barr, O.A. and Ravilious, E., ‘Egypt Through Nineteenth Century Photography’, in Ferrari, A. and Hinson, B. (eds), Visions of Ancient Egypt, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 2022, pp. 49-59

‘Rescuing the Mamluk Minbars of Cairo’, Egyptian Archaeology, 56, Spring 2020, pp.26-30

More about me

My Instagram account: @omabarr