A Beirut-based painter and installation artist, Nada Sehnaoui was sixteen when the Lebanese civil war began. She studied history at Paris IV Sorbonne, film production at Boston University, and fine arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Her work deals with issues of war, personal memory, public amnesia, the writing of history, and the construction of identity. She often works with layers, layers of color, layers of objects, layers of memory, and layers of Beirut surviving through wartimes and reconstruction. Since 2001, Sehnaoui has been creating installations that constitute spaces for personal meditationand social reflection.

In 2008, she created the installation Haven’t 15 Years of Hiding in the Toilets Been Enough, where 600 toilet seats were installed in downtown Beirut in memory of the civil war, a time when people used to hide in bathrooms to take refuge from bombs and sniper fire. Her installation Rubble, presented in Doha in 2009, proposed a meditation on “the ongoing capacity of human beings to reduce other human beings’ lives to rubble.” More recently, she created To Sweep, an installation made of 410 brooms and a long list of items that need to be swept away, such as dictatorship, torture, and fear. This installation was created and photographed for the catalogue of the exhibition “Rebirth” in December 2010, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Tunisian revolution. To Sweep was also exhibited in London at the Royal College of Arts, as part of the exhibition “Subtitled.”

Sehnaoui has exhibited solo in Beirut, New York City, Boston, Doha, and has participated in twenty group shows in the United States (Washington D.C., Houston, Boston), the Middle East (Algiers, Abu Dhabi, Beirut) and Europe (London, Paris, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Munich). Her work is part of the collection of the Commissariat Général aux Relations Internationales de la Communauté Wallonie-Bruxelles and of the collection of the Unites Arab Emirates Ministry of Culture.