About Samia.

Samia Halaby was born in 1936 in Jerusalem, Palestine to Foutonie Abdelnour Atallah Halaby and Assad Saba Halaby. She spent her childhood in Yafa (Jaffa) and elementary school in the port city. When Samia was 11 years old, she and her family (parents, two brothers, and sister) were expelled from their home in 1948 as the state of Israel was created. From 1948 to 1951, she resided in Beirut. In 1951, she immigrated to the United States, settling in to Cincinnati Ohio with her family.

Her education background includes a Bachelor of Science in Design at the University of Cincinnati (1959), Master of Art in Painting at Michigan State University (1960), and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Indiana University (1963). She taught at many universities in the United States including 10 years at the Yale University School of Art (1972-1982) where she was the first female full-time associate professor but did not receive tenure and instead led to an unfair termination. Halaby and students organized an exhibition critical of Yale titles in response. She then devoted her time to painting and art with occasional visiting artist and professor positions at universities in the USA and Palestine. While at Yale, she moved to New York City and continues to live there.

Samia is an abstract painter and that is what she is mostly known for but she has done much more. She is also heralded as an innovative thinker, educator, and activist. She learned programming and produced digital stochastic art on the Commodore Amiga. She has written many articles on art. A special project was “Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre”. In this project, she interviewed survivors of the massacre and created a series of drawings based on the events and stories. When Samia is not busy traveling to international shows and speaking, she retreats to her TriBeCa studio where she enjoys being a recluse as if she’s in a cave or a lone sailor in a deep submarine.