Rose Issa is a curator, writer and producer who has championed visual art and film from the Arab world and Iran for nearly 30 years. She has lived in Iran, Lebanon, France and, for the last 20 years, London, where from her private project space in Kensington she showcases upcoming and established artists, and produces exhibitions and publications with public and private institutions worldwide, including Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, and the Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg.
Michket Krifa is an independant visual art curator for Africa & the Middle East and artistic director for Bamako Encounters, the African Biennial of Photography. She is based in Paris, France.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925, Etel Adnan has received many awards for her more than fifteen books: France Pays-Arab Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, Arab American Book Award, California Book Award for Poetry, Small Press Traffic Lifetime Achievement Award, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and Lifetime Achievement Award from Radius of Arab American Writers. The Etel Adnan Award for Women Playwrights was established by the Al-Medina Theatre of Beirut to support women writers in the Arab World. She was honored with France’s L’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts in 2014. Adnan’s paintings, drawings, fold-out books, ceramics, and tapestries are exhibited on several continents, with recent solo shows at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin); Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha); dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel); MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA); Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Etel Adnan is represented by Galerie Lelong, Paris and New York. She lives in Paris.
Maliheh Afnan was born in 1935 to Persian parents in Haifa, Palestine. Her family moved to Beirut, where she went to high school and later graduated with a BA from the American University of Beirut in 1955. In 1956 she moved to Washington DC, where she graduated with an MA in Fine Arts at the Corcoran School of Art (1962). She spent 23 years in Paris, where she had numerous exhibitions, before settling in London in 1997, where she lived until 2016. Afnan has had several solo shows, including "Speak Memory" (curated by Lutz Becker) and Rose Issa Projects (2013). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world and her work is in several public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum, New York; The British Museum, London; and the Institut du Monde Arabe, Akkram Ojjeh Foundation and BAII Bank Collection, all in Paris. She has also featured in several publications, most recently Familiar Faces (2013, Rose Issa Projects) and Maliheh Afnan: Traces, Faces, Places (2010, Saqi Books & Beyond Art Productions).
Chant Avedissian studied Fine Arts in Montreal and print-making at the Ecole National Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, Paris. He returned to Cairo in 1980 and worked with Hassan Fathy from 1981–89. His work is part of the public collection at the British Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), the National Museum of Scotland and the National Gallery of Jordan. His publications include Cairo Stencils and Patterns, Costumes & Stencils.
Ayman Baalbaki was born in 1975 in Odeissé, Lebanon. He studied Fine Arts in Beirut and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs, Paris. He has exhibited extensively in Beirut and Paris, and in a solo show at Rosa Issa, London, in 2009. His publications include Ayman Baalbaki: Beirut Again and Again. He lives and works in Beirut.
British Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj, the “Andy Warhol of Marrakech” (CNN), has established an international following for his photography. His most recent solo shows include ‘My Rock Stars’ at the Newark Museum, USA (2015) and ‘Kesh Angels’, Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York (2014). His work features in several collections worldwide, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York. Hajjaj shot the photograph of Cardi B for the cover of New York magazine in November 2017. His publications include Hassan Hajjaj: Photography, Fashion, Film, Design.
Bahia Shehab is an award-winning artist, art historian and scholar of Arabic script based in Cairo. Her street art has been on display in museums, galleries and streets around the world, and was featured in the 2015 documentary Nefertiti’s Daughters. She is the recipient of many awards and international recognitions, including the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture (2017), Prince Claus Fund Award (2016), TED Senior fellowship (2016) and BBC 100 Women list (2014). Shehab is associate professor of design and founder of the graphic design program at the American University in Cairo. Her publications include A Thousand Times NO: The Visual History of Lam-Alif.
Photographer, installation and performance artist Raeda Saadeh was born in 1977 in Umm Al-Fahem, Palestine. She received her BFA and MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and spent one year as an exchange student at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine, Metz, France; and Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France. She has been awarded the bronze Chimera at ICASTICA the first International Arezzo Biennial of Art (2013); and the “Young Artist of the Year” prize by the AM Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (200). Her publications include Reframing Palestine.
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, to a Palestinian family. She attended Beirut University College, and came to Britain as a student in the mid-1970s. Throughout the 1980s, she held a number of artist's residencies in Britain, Canada and the United States. Until 1988 Hatoum worked mainly with video and performance. Since 1989 she has concentrated on making installations, notably Light Sentence. She has had solo exhibitions at the Chapter Gallery, Cardiff, the Arnolfini, Bristol and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, as well as at a number of venues across Canada. In 1995 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery. Her publications include Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma. She lives in London.
