Sumayyah Samaha is a Lebanese painter and mixed media artist who has lived and exhibited work in New York since the early 1980’s. She had a recent solo exhibition at Carter Burden Gallery, New York, NY, in September 2019.

In addition to numerous solo exhibitions at 22 Wooster Gallery, Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba House, Denise Bibro Fine Art, and Skoto Gallery, Samaha also has an extensive group exhibition history at venues throughout the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Highlights include American Abstraction: A New Decade at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, PA; New York Chronicles at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Qatar VCUQ Gallery, Doha, Qatar (2010); Art in Embassies, US Embassy, Kuwait City, Kuwait (2008-09); In/Visible: Contemporary Art by Arab American Artists—the opening exhibition of the Arab American National Museum and Cultural Center in Dearborn, Michigan (2005); and New York Collections 2002 at the Albright Knox Museum Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2002).

Samaha’s work can be found in public collections that include the Arab American National Museum and Cultural Center in Dearborn, Michigan; Centrum Sztuki in Warsaw, Poland; Kenkeleba House in New York, NY; Pfizer Pharmaceutical in New York, NY; and Bank Audi in Beirut, Lebanon.

Publications include At the Edge of the City: Reinhabiting Public Space Toward the Recovery of Beirut’s Horsh Al-Sanawar, edited by Fadi Shayya; Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists by Fayeq Oweis; and The Women Artists in Lebanon, by Helen Khal, prepared for the Institute of Women’s Studies in the Arab World.

Samaha was a Co-Founder of 22 Wooster Gallery in New York (1978-1988), has participated in panels, including Turning Writing into Art: Artists Talk on Art at New York University’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and was a juror of painting for the New York Foundation of the Art’s 1998 grant season.

Awards include grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation (2016) and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2015). Samaha is a two time resident at the Emily Harvey Foundation Residency in Venice, Italy.