Yasmina Nysten

Yasmina Alexandra Nysten was born in 1988 in Helsinki, Finland, to a Lebanese mother and a Finnish father, and was raised in Beirut. She lives and works in Astoria, Oregon. She paints in oil on canvas, mostly portraits in which broad areas of muted colour meet small passages of bright colour, with objects and patterned surfaces placed around the sitter.

Her early work centred on the body, in large-format paintings and works on paper. Years of living and exhibiting in New York widened the subject to urban settings and social narratives; on the Pacific coast of Oregon she has turned to portraiture. The paintings in Memory Keepers, dated 2025 and 2026, include Cézanne, Mayyar, Sister Bird and Odessa.

Nysten earned a BFA from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) in 2009 and a master's degree at Pratt Institute in New York in 2012. Her first solo exhibition, The 7 Minute Special, took place in New York in 2009. In 2023 she showed with the American painter Morrison Pierce in a two-person exhibition at Mark Hachem Gallery. In 2026 the Upper Gallery of Saleh Barakat Gallery in Beirut presented her solo exhibition Memory Keepers.