Samia Halaby

Samia Halaby (b. 1936 in Jerusalem) is a Palestinian artist, educator, scholar and activist. Predominantly known as a painter, her multifaceted practice has also been central to the development of digital art. Her involvement in art education is decades-long and she was the first female associate professor at Yale School of Art in the 1970s.

She has demonstrated a long-term commitment to protesting injustices related to class, gender and race. The plight of Palestine has remained central to her activism and her scholarship. Her first major museum retrospective opened at MSU Broad Art Museum in Michigan in 2024, after being cancelled at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art.  

About Samia Halaby

Samia Halaby is a leading abstract painter and an influential scholar of Palestinian art. Although based in the United States since 1951, Halaby is recognized as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world. In her renowned paintings, Halaby draws inspiration from nature and historical movements, such as early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avant-garde. 

Displaced from Palestine in 1948 with her family when she was eleven, Halaby was educated in the American Midwest at a time when abstract expressionism was popular but female abstract painters were marginalized. Halaby believes that new approaches to painting can transform our ways of seeing and thinking, not only within aesthetics, but also as a way to discover new perspectives for advances in teaching, technology, and society at large. This conviction has inspired her to pursue additional experiments in drawing, printmaking, computer-based kinetic art, and free-from-the-stretcher painting. 

Writings by Halaby have appeared in journals including Leonardo: Journal of Arts, Sciences and Technology and Arab Studies Quarterly. Her independently published survey Liberation Art of Palestine (2002) is considered a seminal text of Palestinian art history, and Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre (Schilt Publishing, 2017) was awarded the 2017 Palestine Book Award. 

Her work is exhibited throughout the world. Halaby is in the permanent collections of museums such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); The Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern; and Centre Pompidou.

The MUNCH Award jury statement:

Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem) is a Palestinian artist, based in New York. The MUNCH Award Jury would like to honour Halaby for her visionary and enduring artistic practice. She was at the forefront of the development of digital art through her experiments with early computer animation, and has been exploring abstraction in its different forms for over 60 years. Her paintings both expand geometric traditions from the Islamic context and introduce contributions from around the world to North-Atlantic regional modernism. Halaby believes that innovative approaches to painting can reshape how we see and think – not just in terms of aesthetics, but also by opening up new ways of thinking about education, technology, and broader social issues. As an activist, she has been organizing for causes concerning class, race, and Palestine since the 1970s. Halaby has been a vocal critic of censorship in the arts for decades, which she herself has faced, and overcome.