Linda Dounia Rebeiz (Senegalese-Lebanese, b. 1994)is a self-taught artist who uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) and code, trained on her own paintings and drawings, to build what she calls an “archive of memories”.Working from Dakar, Senegal,she examines the biases embedded in artificial intelligence and the loss of personal and cultural history under technocapitalism.,
Dounia worked as a graphic and interaction designer for more than a decade before transitioning to art.,She began experimenting with generative adversarial networks in 2020 while researching data justice and the work of the Algorithmic Justice League.Without formal art school training or connections to Senegal's gallery circuit, she has said the blockchain gave her the exposure that made a career as an artist possible.She also founded CyberBaat, a DAO supporting artists of African descent.
In 2021 Dounia began Once Upon A Garden, a five-chapter AI project reconstructing critically endangered and extinct flora from West Africa's Sahel region using progressively more advanced generative models over four years. Its first chapter was commissioned by ARTX LAGOS in 2022.Later chapters fed into Flore Perdue, a 2024 commission from Bright Moments for its Paris edition that used a diffusion model to recover memories of her childhood alongside the vanishing flora.,The project's fifth and final chapter, Synthetic Rot, presented 50 stills and 50 videos of flowers rendered from increasingly inorganic, corrupted data.In 2022 Dounia also released Spannungsbogen on Quantum Art, described as the first large-scale AI collection by an African woman and focused on bias in facial recognition technology.
Beginning in 2022, Faux Letters paired her own hand-drawn scripts from more than two dozen writing systems with a diffusion model and a GAN to expose the Roman-alphabet bias built into AI image generators.,The project was released as a print edition with Avant Arte.In 2023 Dounia curated “In/Visible”, an exhibition on Feral File examining how AI represents Black identity.That same year she joined MoMA's Postcard project as one of its first 15 participating artists.She was also named that year to the TIME AI100 list for her work on speculative archiving.,In 2024 she received Mozilla's Rise25 award for her work in AI.In 2025 she was paired with Rhea Myers for a commission on the Museum of the Moving Image's Media Wall, part of its blockchain-focused partnership with the Tezos Foundation.
