American painter and multimedia artist

This is the forty-second of Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series includes personalities from entertainment, business, sports, science, academia, journalism, and politics, among other areas. Our forty-second pathbreaker, Helen Zughaib, a painter and multimedia artist, was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1959. She lived mostly in the Middle East and Europe before coming to the U.S. to study art at Syracuse University. Contributing writer, John Mason tells us how Zughaib’s work addresses matters of cultural identity, family life, the plight of refugees and displacement in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and the Lebanese Civil War.