Long before Alya Naser Albreiki professional, she was already thinking like one. Growing up in Abu Dhabi, her first lessons in spatial storytelling came from an unexpected source: weddings. When asked about this, she smiles, almost as if she is confessing something slightly embarrassing. She would find herself studying the way a ballroom would transform overnight. How colour, texture and material conspire to create something temporary but unforgettable, an exhibition designed to last a single night and linger much longer. “I enjoyed growing up and seeing how weddings were designed,” she recalls and would end up sketching those spaces in her notebooks long before she understood she was practicing the art of exhibition design.

That instinct never left her. Today, as an exhibition designer at Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, Alya is part of the team bringing the story of life on Earth to millions of visitors, and she still approaches each project the way she once did those weddings, as a puzzle of atmosphere, emotion and human behaviour. The process is deeply collaborative, pulling in curators, logistics teams, facility managers, consultants and designers, all of them working toward a single question. “We think of the experience, the visitor experience, how we bring out the information we want that visitor to leave with,” she explains. The question of where to place an object is inseparable from how someone should feel while moving through the space, and what they should carry out the door that they did not have when they walked in.

Innovation, for Alya, means expanding who gets to feel that sense of discovery. She works with 3D development, material exploration, and sustainable approaches, with a strong focus on accessibility. “My main focus in future exhibition designing will be making sure it’s accessible for people of determination,” she says with a certainty that leaves no room for doubt. She wants tactile stations for each exhibit and hopes that a visitor in a wheelchair will encounter the same moments of wonder as a child standing on their own two feet. She is determined to create design that erases the distance between different bodies and different ways of experiencing the world.

As an Emirati woman working at an institution of this scale, Alya is aware that her presence carries meaning beyond her individual contributions. “It reflects how Emirati women today are playing an important and active role shaping our cultural institutions and how global stories are shaped in the UAE,” she says. But for her, the most meaningful feedback comes from the young visitors who move through the galleries with unrestrained curiosity.

During the museum’s Youth Day event, held ahead of the public opening, she watched children running from one display to the next, pointing, asking questions, their faces lit up with something she recognized. Her voice softens when she recalls it. “When I saw kids running around, their curiosity sparked, asking questions, getting inspired, that was exactly what I wanted,” she says. “I knew that I was in the right place.” She pauses before adding, almost quietly, that she would have wished for places like this when she was younger, and that absence now fuels her dedication to the generations coming after her.

The museum currently hosts the Wild- life Photographer of the Year exhibition, a travelling showcase now in its 61st year that features over one hundred images selected from an international competition. “Our role was behind the scenes,” Alya shares. “Coordinating with international partners, reviewing layout and mounting require- ments, preparing the space for the exhibits, ensuring every photograph is installed with precision so the storytelling and visual impact remain intact.” The exhibition was designed in-house and runs at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi until 6 June.

Before the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, Alya’s career wound through some of the most significant cultural institutions in the country. Zayed National Museum, where she contributed to the development of interactive exhibits and collaborated closely with curators. Warehouse421, where she honed her understanding of visitor engagement. The UAE Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where she worked on public facing programmes in an international context. Manar Abu Dhabi, where she contributed to a large-scale light installation on Al Samaliyah Island alongside teamLab. Each of these experiences taught her something different about the relationship between space and impactful narratives.

“Storytelling in cultural spaces is not only about information,” she says. “It’s about creating an emotional connection.” And which experience shaped her the most? For Alya it’s an impossible choice, like asking a parent to name a favourite child. The Venice Biennale showed her how national narratives could travel across borders. Warehouse421 taught her the intimacy of smaller, more experimental spaces. All of it converges now in her work at the museum, where she is constantly asking how a fossil or a photograph or a specimen can do more than just sit behind glass.

When she begins designing a new exhibition, Alya does something that sounds simple but is actually quite radical. She disappears. “I imagine myself as a kid, or as an elder, as someone who’s in a wheel- chair,” she explains. “When you design, it’s not about you. It’s everyone, the mil- lions of people who will journey with this exhibition.” That practice of empathetic displacement keeps her from designing for her own taste or her own assumptions. It pushes her toward tactile stations and accessible layouts and experiences that work for a grandmother and a toddler and a teenager scrolling on their phone, all in the same afternoon.

Ask her what exhibition she would de- sign if there were no limits, and she does not hesitate. She wants to tell the stories behind the science. “I would love to design an exhibition that focuses on the people and journeys behind scientific discoveries at the museum,” she says. “Often in museums, we see the final discoveries like fossils, specimens or photographs, but not always the human stories behind them. Highlighting those journeys would add a powerful human dimension to natural history.” She imagines visitors learning not just about the dinosaur but about the researcher who spent decades looking for it, not just about the photograph but about the photographer who waited weeks in the cold to capture it. That human thread, she believes, transforms a museum visit from an educational exercise into something closer to a conversation across time.

For the visitor walking into Natural His- tory Museum Abu Dhabi for the first time, perhaps carrying assumptions shaped by headlines or brief visits to other cities, Alya hopes for a specific kind of encounter. She wants the first five minutes inside the museum to feel welcoming and inspiring, and she wants them to stop short. “I hope they feel a sense of wonder, the kind that makes them pause and realise how extraordinary our planet is,” she says. “Those first mo- ments should invite visitors to slow down, explore and feel connected to the stories of life on Earth.” It is a quiet ambition, almost understated, and it is also the entire point of what she does. She is not trying to overwhelm anyone. She is trying to make them stop, just for a moment, and really look.

The temporary exhibition strategy at the museum reflects this same philosophy. Alya explains that the team intentionally curates a rotating schedule of shows designed to attract different audiences, including people who might never have considered walking through the doors. “Through temporary exhibitions, we intend to bring different people with different interests,” she says. “Not just natural history enthusiasts. People interested in photography. People who never thought they would visit a natural history museum.” She grins when she says this, clearly delighted by the subversion of expectations. Someone arrives for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year because they love cameras, and they leave having learned something about the fragility of an ecosystem. That transformation is what she is working toward, the quiet shift that happens when good design meets genuine curiosity.

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