Diana Al-Halabi

Born in Lebanon; in 1990, Diana Al-Halabi is a Rotterdam-based visual artist and filmmaker. Through an intersectional feminist lens, Al-Halabi’s practice departs from the personal to the political and tackles notions such as the patriarchal gaze, institutional violence, bureaucracy, settler colonialism, and the visa regime. Her current research is on "Famine and Hunger Strikes: Decolonizing the Digestive System". In addition to her artistic practice, she has also been involved in multiple activist initiatives and community projects. With her work, Al-Halabi aims to challenge dominant power structures and create spaces for resistance. Her works often use moving image, text, performance, and painting as a medium. In 2022, with a crossover to filmmaking, Al-Halabi’s film “The Disaster Cannot Be Contained” was screened in several film festivals, including IFFR, and was awarded as the best short for the national competition at the Beirut Shorts International Film Festival. In 2023, she was awarded the IFFR RTM PITCH Award for producing her short film "The Battle of Empty Stomachs" which premiered at the IFFR 2024. Al-Halabi holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and has completed a one-year fellowship at Ashkal Alwan's Homework space program in Beirut. Her work has been recently exhibited at Garage (Rotterdam), Kiosk (Ghent), Radius CCA Delft(Amsterdam), and many others.