Manal Abu-Shaheen (she/her) is a Lebanese-American photographer, born in Beirut, and currently living and working in Queens, New York. Her recent solo exhibitions include Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ; Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, and Familiar Stranger, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, Old Westbury, New York; The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea; Queens Museum; The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She is a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, A.I.R Gallery Fellowship, and Artist in the Marketplace Residency at the Bronx Museum. Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A from Sarah Lawrence College and MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.

Fellowship Statement

My work focuses on the ways in which globalized communication brings idealized images from one culture in contact with the realities of another. Motivated by a lack of visual history of the landscape in Lebanon, I am building my own photographic archive of what Beirut looks like today: a city dominated by billboards. In one sense the advertisements serve as a visualized end energizing capitalist growth, and in another they purport a mythologized western ideal that is incongruous in the post-conflict city. The advertisements and pervasive neo-liberal capital represent our most recent form of colonialism. What is fascinating to me about this system is that it employs images as its most powerful tool. This under-documented place is now occupied by images of a different place and people.