May Al-Dabbagh is an independent scholar, educator, and curator. 

She conducts research on gender and work in the Gulf using a combination of social psychology, public policy, and post-colonial feminist lenses. She has published in Organization Science, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Idafat: Arab Journal of Sociology (in Arabic). Al-Dabbagh has academic and policy publications in Arabic and English mostly and her work has been featured in over 40 local, regional, and international media outlets.

She has received fellowships from the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), The Women and Public Policy Program (Harvard), and The Global Institute for Advanced Study and Tisch School of the Arts (NYU). 

Most recently, she was tenured as an associate professor at New York University Abu Dhabi where she taught classes such as Women and Work in the Gulf and The Body Archive and ran an interdisciplinary lab (Haraka: Experimental Lab for Arab Art and Social Thought) that produced research and programmatic work on contemporary art and social theory in the Gulf region.

A graduate of Dhahran Ahliyya Schools (Saudi Arabia), she then received a BA with high honors (Harvard University) and a PhD (Oxford University) in psychology. She is married to Hashem Montasser and along with their two children, Abboudy and Loulou, they live a life of continuously shifting positionalities and occasionally poofy hair.