Soraya Abu Naba'a was born in 1985 in Melbourne, Florida, to a Palestinian father and a mother of Lebanese descent born in the Dominican Republic. She spent her formative years in Santo Domingo, absorbing the colours, rhythms, and contrasts of the Caribbean landscape. At eighteen she left for Paris, studying French language and civilisation at the Sorbonne before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Paris American University in 2007. She went on to study sculpture at the Accademia di Arti in Florence, completed an intensive painting programme at Columbia University in New York, and earned her Master of Arts in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London in 2016.
She has participated in over forty group exhibitions, four biennials, and twenty solo shows in galleries across the globe, including Gary Nader Art Centre in Miami, La Galleria in London, and the Royal Houses Museum in the Dominican Republic. Her work is privately collected in Miami, New York, Santo Domingo, Istanbul, Amman, Geneva, and Toronto. Since 2009 she has lived and worked between Santo Domingo and Miami.
Her art evokes an interior cosmos in constant bloom. She refers to her creative process as an outburst: a term that captures both the spontaneity and the introspective depth of her practice. For Soraya, the boundaries between nature and self, between universe and gesture, dissolve into a multidimensional expression that is at once personal and profoundly universal.
