Biography

Nada Sehnaoui is a Beirut-based visual artist whose work, paintings, and installations deal with issues of war, personal memory, public amnesia, the writing of history, and the construction of identity.

Sehnaoui graduated with a DEA in History from Paris IV Sorbonne, and with a Diploma and Fifth Year from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Her body of painting works includes: “How Many How Many More” 2014-19 “Tulips for a Wounded Country” 1992, ‘War Games” 1993, “Lebanese War Statistics” 1994, “When Reading T.S. Eliot” 1999, and “Painting the Orient-Le Jour” 2000 and “How Many How Many More” on which she has been working since 2016.

She has created installations in galleries and museums, as well as large scale public installations such as “Atazzakar, Fractions of Memory” 2003, “Waynoun, Where are they?” 2006, “Haven’t 15 Years of Hiding in the Toilets Been Enough?” 2008, and “Light at the End of the Tunnel” 2012.

Sehnaoui’s paintings and installations have been exhibited in Beirut, Boston, New York, Munich, Paris, London, Strasbourg, Tunis, Algiers, Marseille, Abu Dhabi, Washington DC, and Dubai. Her works have been featured in over sixty Lebanese and Arab newspapers, and the international press such as Le Monde, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, El Pais, El Mundo, The Washington Post, L’Express International, The Washington Diplomat, Prophecy, Polystyrène, and Berlin ¼ Quarterly.

Her work can be found in a number of private collections as well as in the public collection of the Commissariat Général aux Relations Internationales de la Communauté Wallonie Bruxelles, the Collection of the Ministry of Culture of the United Arab Emirates, The Saradar Collection and in the Sursock Museum.

Sehnaoui has a published book on the history of the westernization of daily life in Beirut (1860-1914), as well as several published articles on human rights and politics. She is a founding member of the Civil Center for National Initiative and a member of Beirut Madinati.