Yara Chaalan

Yara Chaalan (b. 1998, Lebanon) is a Lebanese artist based in Dubai. She works in oil and watercolour painting, embroidery on textile and video. Many works merge her own figure with Lebanese landscapes, and she treats some of the paintings as self-portraits.

Her practice looks at the body as a landscape shaped by migration, memory and the idea of home. The series Land from Memory was painted away from Lebanon, from photographs and memory. Titles include Zaarour From Pictures and Zaarour From Memory. With Yegane Mehrzad and Alessia Talò she formed Crow Stitch Collective. Its short film and installation The Gift of the Mild Soil was shown in Scores of Resilience in Den Bosch in 2025. During the Fann À Porter residency in 2026 she made oil paintings, including El Arz and Falougha, and embroidered works.

Chaalan holds a BFA from the Lebanese American University, Beirut (2021). She took a master's in Visual Arts and Post-Contemporary Practice at the Masters Institute in Visual Cultures, Den Bosch (2024). She showed in Interface: Five in Beirut (2023) and A room without corners in the Netherlands (2025). She took part in the Eye Research Lab at Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, in 2023. In 2026 she took part in Fann À Porter's summer residency in Dubai.