Artist Biography

I am the daughter of an impossible union. Politically, I should be dead. My ancestors survived both the Holocaust of Europe and the Nakba of Palestine and by the laws of luck their offspring bore me; almost mockingly, ironically. I, along with possibly countless others, am alive and able to create despite the horrors of war and entrapment. I have spent my young life as a Third-Culture Child, exploring with my parents different depths of the world around us because they never felt at home in their given displacement locations. Since I was born, I have known pieces of countless societies and languages, having been born and raised abroad in South Korea and Jordan as a trilingual child. I have also seen the scale of mass suffering in the name of capitalism and lived to see it on a couple sides. When I moved to America after the Arab Springs of Jordan forced us to relocate for safety's sake, I began a life of luxury I would only later realize was possible because of the suffering of Native People worldwide. I slowly became mesmerized by the human experience, having been immersed in so many versions of its actuality, and the only way I’ve known how to process these complexities is via paper, as an artist and a writer. I am captivated and in utter terror the more I learn and uncover the secrets of our human race. The lies we try to hide behind. I want to show the world what’s hiding in the shadows. The faces that have been shoved away, the lives that have been discarded and forgotten about. For all that we say learning history helps us to never relive it, we have in fact been living through the same cycles of violence for centuries under different covers. I think it’s time to make people uncomfortable, to make people remember. The Nakba is a real word (despite what spellcheck says), this violence did happen, we are sitting on stolen land, we are causing mass destruction to our coral reefs, and our brains with all this plastic and chemicals. Yet things that were once impossible are happening, there is hope nested in crevices everywhere. Creating is a beautiful, non-violent way to grieve or experience these human experiences and emotions in a manner where there are no rights and wrongs. And although the fear of mediocrity often weighs me down, I’d say it’s better to create the reality I live in than to live without understanding my reality at all.