Palestinian painter.
Samia Halaby is a leading contemporary abstract painter and a prominent scholar of Palestinian art. In addition to her career as an artist, she is also heralded as a creative thinker, educator and activist. In the past three decades, she has widely published on art history, art pedagogy and aesthetics.
In 1948, S. Halaby’s family was displaced from Palestine and settled in the United States in 1951. She was educated in the American Midwest when Abstract Expressionism was very popular, but the art world ignored women abstract painters. In the early 1960s, shortly after graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in painting from Indiana University Bloomington, S. Halaby began teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute. She travelled to the Eastern Mediterranean on a faculty research grant in 1964 and did intensive research on geometric abstraction in the Islamic architecture of the region, which has been a major source of inspiration for her work.
