Born in Beirut, Lebanon, I emigrated to the U.S. with my family in 1978 at the height of the Lebanese Civil War. After having been first driven out of our Beirut home and my mother and father losing the school they built there, we were then driven out of our ancestral village home in Bint Jbeil, when Israel launched the first of many ill-fated invasions into South Lebanon, subsequently destroying my family's fig, peach and quince (safarjal) trees.  Thankfully, they were not able to destroy our olive trees. After studying architecture for a period of time, I studied painting, art history and education at Wayne State University and received a degree in art education.  Upon experiencing certain established divides and fragmentations that exist within the institutionalized art community, the academic community, the anti-war & activist community, and the Arab community in southeast Michigan, I’ve begun to forge smallish inroads into these cultures and sub-cultures, for the purpose of making connections that eliminate the generational, racial, class, cultural and educational divides.  In 2004 I helped found OTHER- Arab Artists Collective in Detroit, a collaborative intellectual/artist venture.  In 2006 I received the annual Artist/Performer Award from the Mayor of Dearborn and the Dearborn Community Arts Council, and in 2007 I received the Wayne State University Art Education Department's first annual “Community Service Award”.  I am currently a high school art & design teacher with the Dearborn Public Schools, a privilege that provides me with vast fulfillment.  I am married and a grateful father of three young children.

Our upbringing in the Detroit area spanned the distance of separation and the passion of longing. Our community has been undergoing a ceaseless nascency of consecutive, turbulent waves of immigration from Arab countries, stemming directly from the ongoing political strife that continues to grip those societies there, and consequently the community here, in a merciless state of social, historical and psychological crisis.  We also grew up to navigate the ultra-complex social and economic systems and counter-systems that define the American landscape and its rapid, turbulent history. Thus is our experience, wrought with the tumultuous defining and redefining of identity and belonging, struggling against injustice and exclusion, reaching for truth, and envisioning an ideal that still writhes in mid-transformation.

The world rushes past us, screeching like a duststorm at the heels of a devastating horde; we stand in our spaces, attempting to withstand the gusts of power, violence and intimidation; we clutch at the memories of ourselves and our origins, protecting them from the tormenting currents that coil around us; each of us admonished, enduring the terror of the storm. The air feels historic, but in a dreadful, brutal way.

My artistic explorations range from personal-emotional portraits that dig beyond the skin to manifest the disjointed map of the self, to attempts at re-creating the lost memory of a misplaced homeland, to portrayals of a double consciousness that struggles between here and there, searching for purpose in the mainstream culture here and salvaging deteriorating life connections there.  In exploring our innermost voices, struggling with the mysteries of memory and loss is inevitable.  Reflections of forsaken homes that are no longer familiar, of a more primordial land, are initially psychological revelations that are intangible and not formed, and so the exploration of these images is an exploration of that which is elusive and pliable.