Saloua Raouda Choucair

Saloua Raouda Choucair was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1916. She studied the natural sciences at the American Junior College for Women (now the Lebanese American University) from 1934 to 1937 and then moved with her parents to Iraq in 1937 where she taught drawing. She returned to Beirut in 1937, training in the studio of Omar Onsi. She later attended art classes with the painter Moustafa Farroukh at the American University of Beirut (AUB) while pursuing a degree in philosophy. In 1948 she enrolled at l’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and trained in Fernand Léger’s studio. She returned to Beirut permanently in 1951 and exhibited annually in the Salon du Printemps at the UNESCO Palace and the Salon d’Automne at the Sursock Museum in the long 1960s. Her work also appeared in group exhibitions in Beirut at Contact Art Gallery (1972), Gallery One (1974), Modulart (1975) and Dar el-Fan (1975). She participated in the 1968 Alexandria Biennale. In 1986, she lectured in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of AUB. She was awarded an appreciated prize by the General Union of Arab Painters in 1985 and a medal by the Lebanese government in 1988. More recently, retrospective exhibitions were held at the Beirut Exhibition Center in 2011 and at Tate Modern in 2013.