“I’m telling people's stories, not mine." — Katya
Born in Beirut in 1960, Katya Traboulsi is a Lebanese multimedia artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. She studied Interior Design at the Lebanon School of Art (1983). In 2000, she founded Katya Traboulsi Atelier, an independent art space supporting emerging regional artists.
Active since the 1980s, her practice spans painting, object-making, and installation, in which she probes identity, collective memory, and cultural resilience through rigorous formal reprocessing of materials. Over time, she has worked in media including metal, resin, ceramics, wood, brass, iron, and painted surfaces, reinterpreting vernacular symbols drawn from Lebanese social and historical life. Her more recent projects incorporate archival, journalistic, and craft traditions, transforming utilitarian or even destructive forms, such as mortar shells and truck tailgates, into reflective sculptural objects. This arc spans expressive figuration, conceptual object-work, and a hybrid engagement with postwar material culture in the Arab context.
Traboulsi has exhibited widely across Dubai, Kuwait, Paris, London, and New York. In 2014, she took part in Anatomical Beauty at ARTSPACE, Dubai, and in Art 14 at the Olympia Exhibition Center, London. Major solo exhibitions include Perpetual Identities at Saleh Barakat Gallery (Beirut, 2018) and at Leila Heller Gallery (Dubai, 2023). Her work has also been presented by the Middle East Institute (Washington, D.C., 2019), the Museum of Modern Art of Algeria, and in international fairs such as The Armory Show (New York) and MENART Fair (Dubai). She is also the author of Generation War (2013), revisiting the archives of photojournalists who documented Lebanon’s war years. Most recently, in 2025 she participated in the Cheongju Craft Biennale in South Korea.
Traboulsi’s works are held in public and private collections, including the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (Beirut); the Imago Mundi Collection (Italy); the Montblanc Art Collection (Dubai); the Salsali Private Museum (Dubai); the Leo Burnett Collection (Dubai); the Fortune Promoseven Collection (Dubai); and the Ogilvy and Mather Collection (Dubai).
