Katya Traboulsi

Katya Traboulsi (, Assouad; born in 1960) is a Lebanese artist whose work has been exhibited at venues including the Saleh Barakat Gallery in Beirut and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her exhibition "Perpetual Identities" at the Saleh Barakat Gallery featured 46 hand-painted replicas of Lebanese war shells. Traboulsi's work incorporates elements from Lebanese cultural imagery, as documented in her published book "Generation War" (2013), which chronicles Lebanon's 1975–1990 civil war period through artistic interpretation. Her work has been acquired by institutions including the Sursock Museum in Beirut.

She is a Beirut-based multimedia artist whose practice is characterized by the emotional intensity with which she confronts the effects of the Lebanese civil war. Her paintings and sculptural works are characterized by her bold use of color.

Early life Traboulsi's interest in art was first informed by her grandmother's paintings, which led her to consider pursuing graduate studies in fine arts. She envisioned a career path in painting through studies in Paris after completing her foundational education in Lebanon, but her father's objections caused her to instead pursue interior design at the Lebanon School of Art in 1983.

Following her graduation, Traboulsi explored art galleries and exhibitions, and ran her own printing press, Systeco, where she also worked as a production manager from 1982 until 1988. After organizing a variety of different exhibitions for her painterly works in 1986, where the institution helped young artists progress in their careers.

Work Traboulsi's artistic timeline can be divided into two defining periods: the authorial expressionist phase of her earlier career, and the later period marked by collaboration, political engagement, and multidisciplinary approaches. These periods intersect in works spanning the mid-2000s to the early 2010s.

During her early period, Traboulsi aligned herself with the Figuration Libre movement, an artistic wave that emerged in 1980s France, characterized by the use of bold lines, intricate patterns, and whimsically-drawn human figures and environments. These early works were largely acrylic paintings. as in Forbidden Words (2006), and the Lebanese civil war in Age of Rage (2012). In 2013, she curated the work of different photojournalists that were active during the Lebanese civil war in a body of work titled Generation War. Traboulsi documented history in a manner that emphasized these individuals' experiences at the time.

In her work, Traboulsi has made use of different kinds of materials including acrylics, light-boxes, brass, resin, and iron. Traboulsi has produced work that is in line with different currents of expressionism, conceptual art, and pop art, and tackled themes such as celebrity, music,

Beyond her art, Traboulsi described herself as doing everything with a "scream of peace".