Ghia Haddad

While my graphic design experience and my public community art projects have developed my skills as an artist who is successful at building community through art, I continue to be mostly interested in creating artwork that directly addresses the global conversation. These past 2 years have seen many crucial issues come front and center and the current pandemic has given artists like me the time and space to address these ideas to a global audience on social media. Before the pandemic, I was dedicating my artistic energy outwards, towards enriching and empowering others in my community. These last 18 months, however, through the pandemic restrictions, I turned my energy inwards. And through this quest, I have found that my Arab background makes me hyper-aware of constant misrepresentations and damaging stereotypes that minority women are subjected to on a regular basis; particularly how politics directly and deliberately alters the shape we take, and how this shape often becomes our own projection of ourselves. In response, I try to use my art and the vehicle of social media to take back that narrative and project an alternative image and a de-colonized self. I often accompany my posts with a piece of written text or poem to complement the image.