Samia Halaby

Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem, Palestine) is a Palestinian-American artist based in New York who works in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and computer-based kinetic art. Her abstraction draws on trees, light, city motion, Islamic geometric architecture and the Russian avant-garde. Her paintings are oil or acrylic on canvas, linen or jute, sometimes unstretched, which she calls "free-from-the-stretcher painting". Her kinetic paintings are moving abstract animations, later with sound, which she codes herself.

On a 1964 faculty grant, Halaby travelled to the Eastern Mediterranean and studied the geometry of its Islamic architecture. In 1986 she bought a Commodore Amiga 1000 and taught herself to program. Constructivist 10 (1986) and Weavings (1987) are short Amiga kinetic paintings. With the Kinetic Painting Group she performs live with musicians, playing her program from a keyboard. Clouds and Trees (2013) is a square acrylic canvas of green trees rising to cumulus clouds. Her documentary drawings of the Kafr Qasem Massacre come from her interviews with survivors.

She took a BS (1959) at the University of Cincinnati, an MA (1960) at Michigan State University and an MFA (1963) at Indiana University. For about a decade she taught at the Yale School of Art, its first full-time female associate professor. Solo exhibitions include Lasting Impressions, Sharjah Art Museum (2023), and Eye Witness, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing (2024). The Museum of Modern Art (2025) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2026) showed her kinetic paintings. Her painting Black is Beautiful (1969) was in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), whose jury gave her a Special Mention. She showed in Electric Dreams at Tate Modern (2024) and the Whitney Biennial (2026), and won the MUNCH Award (2025). Collections holding her work include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the British Museum and the Centre Pompidou.