Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi is the founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation, an independent initiative established to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Arab region through the establishment of a prominent and publicly accessible art collection in the UAE. The foundation currently has exhibitions at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Al Qassemi is also a columnist whose articles have appeared in The Financial Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Open Democracy, The National and The Globe and Mail, as well as other publications. In addition, he is a prolific commentator on Arab affairs on Twitter. His tweets rose in particular prominence during the Arab Spring, and became a major news source that rivalled the major news networks at the time. Time magazine listed his Twitter account among the “140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2011.”

Al Qassemi was an MIT Media Lab Director's Fellow, and in 2014 Arabian Business placed him on its list of the World's 100 Most Powerful Arabs, under the Thinkers category. He continues both to write and tweet about the Arab world from his home in Sharjah, as well as from overseas, where he frequently lectures. In the Spring of 2017, Al Qassemi was a practitioner in residence at the Hagop Kevorkian Center of Near East Studies at New York University, where he offered a special course entitled “Politics of Middle Eastern Art.”