Cici Sursock

Cici Sursock (née Justina Tommaseo) was born in 1923 in Split, Yugoslavia. Her father was a diplomat who relocated with his family regularly. Sursock spent her childhood in Vienna and then studied at the School of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where she took painting classes with Ivan Tabaković. She then joined her parents in Ankara where she attended The School of Applied Arts and trained in the studios of Nurettin Ergüven and Turgut Ziam. She then relocated with her family to Tehran momentarily before moving to Cairo in 1944 where she worked as a designer for the British Ministry of Information. In 1947, she married the Lebanese aristocrat Habib Sursock and lived in the Royal Guézireh Palace. In 1964, the Sursocks lost their property under the Nasserist regime and settled in Beirut, Lebanon until 1978. She held solo exhibitions at the Phoenicia Hotel (1965), the Vendôme Hotel (1966) and the St. Georges Hotel (1974). She participated in the Salon d’Automne at the Sursock Museum in 1967, 1969 and 1974, as well as in other group exhibitions at the John F. Kennedy Center (1968, 1969), The German Cultural Center (1972), The Delta International Art Center (1972) and Galerie Contemporaine (1974). Her work features in the collection of the Sursock Museum in Beirut.