A forerunner of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world, Samia Halaby (Jerusalem, 1936) is a leading abstract painter and a prominent scholar. After receiving her Masters in Painting from Indiana University, she studied geometric abstraction in Islamic architecture around the Eastern Mediterranean. Halaby has been collected by international institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Yale University Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du Monde Arabe; and the British Museum. She was the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art and publishes academic articles about Palestinian art.