Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس is a hybrid poet working in the praxis of technological, artistic, and pedagogical hybridity and how partial beings, one influenced by disembodied dislocation, can find belonging in third space spatiality.
Placing poetry at the center of her practice, she works across painting, film, video, animation, sound, experimental theater, design, performance, and new innovations in technology and media to challenge conventional ideas of linear language, form, and binary perceptions. Moving between word and image, she embraces the intimate and the political, especially in the aftermath of dramatic societal changes, such as Covid, social media, and AI. Her work seeks to materialize a third space of belonging for marginalia and their narratives, with hopes the post-colonial world can exist with reparations and radical acceptance.
Her practice is shaped by query. What is interrelated relationship between belonging and dislocation? Divinity and spirituality? And the dialectical relationship between beauty and cruelty? Through the accumulation, repetition, and recontextualization of personal and collective archives, especially of the marginalia, she investigates the image as a site of historical transmission and political contestation. Informed by South Asian art histories, postcolonial theory, and experimental literary traditions, her work attends to the afterlives of colonialism, the violences of erasure, and the unstable conditions through which identities and histories are represented. Her practice advances a commitment to decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure methodologies, treating poetry as a means of contesting dominant regimes of representation while making space for beauty.
Positioning poetry as both medium and method, Raees explores how prosodic structures, visual motifs, and non-linear forms of language might generate modes of meaning beyond conventional textual expression. Her video poetry and hybrid visual works bring literary composition into dialogue with animation, archival footage, painting, sound, and installation. This inquiry increasingly extends into creative technology, with an interest in creative coding, image mapping, generative systems, and immersive media. Rather than treating technology as a neutral instrument, she approaches it as a potential site of poetic experimentation: a medium of investigating how spatial environments might endorse a new facet of language.
Raees works as an Assistant Professor at CUNY. Her pedagogical practice is rooted in query and critical reflection. She understands writing as a process through which students can interrogate inherited frameworks of knowledge, examine the relationship between lived experience and social structures, and develop greater agency over their intellectual and creative production. Drawing on Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, her pedagogy emphasizes inquiry before statements where feedback as a dialogic practice rather than a unilateral judgment. She has taught poetry through the lens of hybridization such as "Build Me A Third Place For Exist: The Video Poem" and "Poetry of Collaboration: Radical Togetherness in a Time of Crisis."
Beyond the classroom, she has contributed to literary and cultural communities through her editorial work at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, where she served as Poetry Editor from 2019 to 2026. She was the founder of Habib Poetry Festival in Karachi as well as of One Minute Press, a small press celebrating micro literature and art through zines from Asian/Asian American identities.
She is from Pakistan: from Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Mianwali, Bahawalpur.
She lives in the USA, proudly, as a working writer and artist: New York City, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Bennington.
She is always around and not around: ayeraees@gmail.com