Ayla Hibri is a Lebanese visual artist working across painting, drawing, and photography. Born in Beirut in 1987, she is currently based between Amman and Beirut. She holds a BA in Interior Architecture from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) and studied photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Her practice is shaped by movement across cities, close observation, collected images, and an expanding interest in imagination, dreams, and invented worlds.
Hibri first developed her visual language through photography. For more than a decade, she traveled widely, documenting a streets, interiors, people, animals, objects, plants, and empty spaces. This long-term photographic practice formed an extensive archive of everyday life and recurring visual patterns across different geographies. Over time, this archive became a foundation for her painting, allowing observed reality to reappear through memory, color, gesture, and intuition.
In recent years, painting has become the center of Hibri's practice. Her works open into imagined worlds populated by unfamiliar creatures, plants, flowers, fossils, and organic forms. These images emerge through an intuitive process guided by hand movement, muscle memory, and the unconscious. Forms gradually appear, shift into one another, and create suspended environments that feel distant from ordinary time.
Hibri's transition from photography to painting began during an artist residency in Brazil, after several rolls of film taken during Carnival failed to develop. She turned to painting as another way of registering experience, eventually developing a visual language grounded in invention and inner landscapes. Her paintings continue to carry traces of photography through their stillness, frontal presence, and sense of captured time.
Across her recent work, Hibri moves away from the human figure toward alternative worlds where fauna, flora, and invented beings coexist. Her imagery draws from dreams, ancient image-making, fossils, cave art, outsider art, and early forms of visual expression. Through these references, she searches for a language that feels primal, intuitive, and removed from the pressures of contemporary life.
Hibri's work proposes imagination as a space of freedom. Her painted worlds invite viewers into unfamiliar environments shaped by calm, harmony, escape, and inner life. Through color, rhythm, and organic form, she gives visual structure to states of wonder, distance, and psychological release.
Hibri's photographic work remains an important part of her practice. Her archive functions as a private visual library, organized around recurring subjects and motifs. Flowers, animals, found images, objects, and collected fragments continue to inform her sense of form, pattern, and composition. This relationship between archive and imagination allows her work to move between observation and invention.
Hibri has presented her work through exhibitions, publications, and cultural projects in Lebanon and internationally. Her photographic essays have been featured by Athens Design Forum in The Chain: Toys, Metal Welders, Dreamers, which traces visual and material encounters across Jordan, Eritrea, and beyond. She is also the author of A Palm Tree Bows to the Moon, published by Kaph Books, a photographic publication composed of black-and-white images taken in Lebanon and accompanied by her own poems.