My paintings draw on women found in colonial and personal archives. I relocate their faces within hard-edged geometric spaces built with minimal means, just enough information to suggest place while remaining untethered to a fixed time or geography.

Meticulously rendered faces sit against drawn lines and colour fields. Precise detail meets cropping and fragmentation, resisting a coherent whole. Each painting establishes its own rules; breaking one becomes the premise for the next.

Rather than recovering what the archive obscures, I'm interested in what painting can do to images already shaped by history, convention and expectation. I work with and against my own assimilations to optimise and clarify, to make what was legible incoherent. I use painting to estrange the familiar tropes I have inherited, thickening the interval between recognition and resolution.

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Dora Lam has recently completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, supported by the Cass Art Scholarship. She is shortlisted for the Chadwell Award 2026.

She has exhibited at the ICA, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Museum of the Home, and The Ugly Duck, and has given talks at Tate Liverpool, Museum of the Home, and City University. 

Dora lives and works in London. 

EDUCATION
2026 MA Painting, Royal College of Art 
2021 Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, Royal College of Art - Distinction
2005 BSc Business Computing Systems, City University London - First Class (Hons.)

AWARDS & SCHOLARSHIPS
2026 Chadwell Award (Shortlisted)
2025 Cass Art Scholarship Award
2021 Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) Award

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 
2026 Group Exhibition, LBF Contemporary
2026 At 5am, I woke up., FILET
2026 RCA 2026 Show, Royal College of Art
2026 ‘Ongoing’, Noho Showrooms
2026 Entanglements, Annex by Koppel Projects
2025 The Last Salon, Old Waiting Room Peckham
2025 Untold, AMP Gallery
2023 Not Too Sweet (London Short Film Festival), ICA
2023 Uncovering Vietnamese Archives, Museum of the Home
2023 ALTAR-NATIVE, Ugly Duck
2023 The Navigator Project, Fitzrovia Gallery
2021 Grayson Perry’s Art Club, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

RESIDENCIES
2025 Lost wax casting, Walnut Works Foundry
2023 Uncovering Vietnamese Archives, Museum of the Home 
2021 Intangible Cultural Heritage, China Exchange

TALKS & PUBLIC PROGRAMMES
2024 ESEA Critical Directions Panel, City University
2024 Game Night with ESEA Community Centre Panel, Barbican
2023 Heritage, Research and Collaboration Talk, Tate Liverpool 
2023 No Place Like Home Panel, Museum of the Home
2021 WE/MAKE/DO: Bridging the generation gap Workshops, Online