Faisal Samra

Born Bahrain, 1956

Samra graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts, Paris. Of Saudi parentage, he began work in Saudi Arabia as a stage and graphic designer before founding his own design company in Dammam. Between 1987 and 1992 he lived in Paris, where he worked as a fine arts and graphics consultant at the Institut du Monde Arabe. He later taught drawing and painting at the College of Fine Arts in Amman, Jordan, and at his studio in Bahrain. In 2005 he was appointed artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, and was a member of the jury at the Alexandria Biennial, Egypt. Samra has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions in the Middle East, the USA and Europe, among them his 1991 solo exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the eighth International Cairo Biennial, 2001; the Kinda Collection at the Institut du Monde Arabe, 2002; the Kunstmuseum and Frankfurt Book Fair, Germany, 2005. His work has been featured in numerous articles and television programmes, and he has received several awards, including an invitation to participate in the United Nations fiftieth-anniversary exhibition Dialogues of Peace: 50 Artists Worldwide, Geneva, Switzerland, 1995, and, in 1998, to take part in Liberté 98, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations, New York. He lives and works as an independent artist based in Bahrain.