ARTIST BIO

I am a Dubai-based artist, with roots in Beirut. My journey, shaped by war and displacement, has cultivated an appreciation for art's transformative potential. This drives my dedication to art as a catalyst for positive societal change.
Concurrently pursuing a master's degree in museum studies, I manage my art practice from my Dubai home studio.
My expertise centers on portraying the stories of marginalized women through figurative art. Employing elements like fabrics, flowers, beads, strings, and embroidery, I weave narratives that challenge preconceptions about these mediums’ place in the realm of high art.
My work has been featured in print in Art Seen, Artist Talk, Women United Art Magazine, and All She Makes magazines. Additionally, I was featured in 12 online exhibitions between 2019 and the present.
Consistently participating in World Art Dubai between 2020 and 2023 –including a solo booth in 2022 and another planned for 2024 –has kept my art visible and new. I was also part of “The Portrait Show” at Hubspace Gallery, the Al Fanar Restaurant National Day Exhibit, and Kawkab Art’s Dubai Box Park Art Show.
My artistic impact extended beyond Dubai with juried participation in Chicago's WCA's prestigious 50th national convention and the selective WCADC show at Maryland's Sandy Springs Museum. My work was well received at Kuwait’s Boushahry Gallery’s “Art is Life”, a highly attended exhibition. I am now preparing for a solo show in Greeley’s Bean Plant Studio for October 2023.
I was among a select group invited to the 2023 Japan International Art Exchange at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. After securing the 8th position in the Women United Art Prize 2022 Collage and Fiber Art Category, I am trying again for a hopeful win.
Enthusiasts can explore and engage with my pieces on Saatchi Art and Kawkab Art online platforms.

ARTIST STATEMENT

While fiber arts have existed forever, they were dismissed from the sphere of high art for their association with femininity and domesticity and banned by The Royal Academy of Art in the 18th century. This resulted in the omission of countless women’s stories from the canon of Western art.
Art from the global South, on the other hand, was relegated to an academically inferior platform for its use of “crafty” materials such as textiles.
Through experiments with fabric, strings, and yarn, my work merges East and West, old and new, feminine and masculine, to challenge the traditional Western understanding of art and ask questions about the role of women of color within it.
This series, “Flowers For Her Hair”, resets the connection between women, earth, and society. It imagines a world where women are free from the lotions and potions associated with an impossible physical ideal, unsustainable for humans and damaging for the planet. While producing harmful environmental waste, the hair industry feeds the insatiable hold of societal norms on women.
In this imagined reality, women are again one with the earth, flowers replacing their hair. It pictures a rebirth where women flourish, free of the pressures imposed by a multimillion-dollar industry surrounding hair products and treatments. It erases endless debates ranging from racial stigma to body shaming to social status to religious debate with hair at their source.
This collection challenges the co-opting of women’s bodies designed to control and tame a feature naturally designed to shield and protect their bodies.
It asks, what if we all had flowers instead of hair?
My art imagines a world where flowers adorn our heads to relieve us from the shackles of societal expectations and to ease us back to an unsoiled earth, until we are finally allowed to blossom – free.

Dubai / UAE