Jumana Bayazid El-Husseini

Jumana Bayazid El-Husseini was born in Jerusalem in 1932. She hailed from a prominent Palestinian family. Her grandfather, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, served as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate. Following the 1948 exodus (al-Nakba), her family settled in Lebanon. She studied political science at the Beirut College for Women (now the Lebanese American University) from 1953 to 1957 and enrolled in art classes. She held her first solo show at the German Cultural Center in Beirut (1968) and went on to show at Galerie L’Antiquaire in 1973. In between, she participated in group exhibitions in several venues in Beirut, including Sursock Museum’s salons d’Automne (1965, 1966, 1967), Gallery One (1967), the John F. Kennedy Cultural Center in Beirut (1968) and the Delta International Art Center (1972). After the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, she relocated to Paris where she remained for the rest of her life. She participated in several biennials, including the First Arab Biennial in Baghdad (1974), at the Japanese Society of Afro-Asian Artists in Tokyo (1978), and the Venice Biennale (1979). She continued to show her work in solo and group exhibitions worldwide in venues such as The Smithsonian Institute (1973), Washington DC; United Nations, Geneva; Modern Art Museum, Warsaw (1980); National Museum of Madrid (1980), Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (1988), Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (1989, 1997); Barbican, London (1989). Her work is collected by The Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut and the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.