19 Facts About Bahia Shehab

Bahia Shehab is a Lebanese Egyptian multidisciplinary artist, designer, historian, creative director, educator and activist based in Cairo.

Bahia Shehab's work is concerned with identity and cultural heritage, and uses Islamic art history and in particular Islamic calligraphy and graphic design to explore contemporary Arab politics, feminist discourse and social issues.

Bahia Shehab's culturally oriented work is concerned with using history as a means to better understand the present, and to find solutions for the future.

Bahia Shehab's research is largely concerned with understanding Arabic script, and much of her work explores both traditional and refashioned Arabic calligraphy.

Bahia Shehab was born in 1977 in Lebanon, and grew up there.

Bahia Shehab studied graphic design at the American University of Beirut, studied for a master's degree at the American University in Cairo, and completed her PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Bahia Shehab began teaching at the American University in Cairo in 2010, and in 2011 established the Graphic Design program at the university's Department of the Arts in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Bahia Shehab encourages her students to make use of their interests while developing their work, and emphasizes the need to use design to solve problems.

Bahia Shehab has lectured internationally on Arab visual culture and design, design education and curriculum development, women's rights, social issues and Islamic cultural heritage.

Bahia Shehab has served locally, regionally and internationally on international design juries, for example for the Art Directors Club of New York 101st Annual Awards.

In 2010, the Khatt Foundation in Amsterdam invited Bahia Shehab to produce an artwork for the exhibition "The Future of Tradition", whose purpose it was to commemorate 100 years of Islamic art in Europe after the exhibition "Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art" at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany.

Bahia Shehab's project "A Thousand Times NO" was an art installation and research project that went on display in a room curated by Huda Smitshuijzen Abifares, the founder of Khatt Foundation, with other female artists from the Arab world celebrating the Arabic script.

Bahia Shehab sought out one thousand different designs of Arabic no's, finding them on buildings, mosques, plates, textiles, pottery and books, and from countries including Spain, China, Afghanistan and Iran - all places where Islam had thrived at one point in history or another.

Bahia Shehab included the minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo in Syria, but it appears in ruins, to represent the cultural disaster that struck in 2013 when the minaret was bombed.

Bahia Shehab's choice was inspired by the idea that it is time for the feminine voice to rise.

Since 2016, Bahia Shehab has been working on a global street interventions campaign that involves spray painting quotes from the Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish on the walls of streets around the world.

Bahia Shehab believes that Darwish's words are relevant to the political situation in which we find ourselves today.

Bahia Shehab's walls painted up until 2017 were published in her book At the Corner of a Dream published by Gingko library in London.

Bahia Shehab's work is concerned with issues of current political interest, such as the civil war in Lebanon from the 1980s, the revolution that swept through Egypt in 2011, and the rights of political prisoners.