Here's an example of her work and a brief bio:
As the recipient of the 2018 Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art, a prestigious award given each year by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Samah Shihadi is headed toward the spotlight. In addition to the $10,000 prize, Shihadi will show her work in a solo exhibition at the museum in June 2019.
Born in a small Muslim village in the Western Galilee, 31-year-old Shihadi thought she would return to her village after her studies to become a teacher and raise a family, like other women in her life. Instead she started to draw, depicting Arab women and giving them a voice.
Her delicate pencil-on-paper drawings are often centered around the female body, exploring feminism and the identity of the Arab woman. In a work evocative of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece “The Vitruvian Man,” currently exhibited at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art, Shihadi depicts a woman rather than a man, whose body is mostly covered by a sheet of cloth, suggesting exclusion or repression.
Shihadi now lives and works in Haifa, where she completed a master’s degree in art. Her work has been shown in shows and galleries across Israel, from Tel Aviv to Haifa, Umm el Fahem and Ramallah.
