Jumana Emil Abboud

Jumana Emil Abboud was born in 1971 in Shefa-Amr

Abboud was born in 1971 in Shefa-Amr. As a child she moved with her family to Canada, where she began taking art courses at school, including drawing, still-life painting and calligraphy.

She studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto from 1989 to 1991. In 1991 her father died suddenly, and she returned to Shefa-Amr with her mother and siblings. She later studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and graduated in 1996.

Abboud works with drawing, video, installation, performance, text and sculpture. Her themes include memory, loss, belonging and longing, and she draws on Palestinian folklore, fairy tales and landscape. In the series built around Rapunzel she looks at the lives of Arab women.

In Hide Away the Water from the Sun, a three-channel video installation, she worked with filmmaker Issa Freij to film lost springs tied to folk beliefs about water spirits. Her work has appeared at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial and the Sydney Biennial. In 2016 she held a solo exhibition at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.