Isam Bader was born in 1948 in Hebron, Palestine. He graduated from the Baghdad Fine Arts Academy in 1973 and received his MA in Ceramics from the Tbilisi Academy of Fine Arts in Georgia in 1982.
Bader was a painter and ceramicist and is considered by many as Palestine’s finest ceramicist of the latter part of the 20th Century. He studied fine art because of a love for ceramics brought about by his early influences in his hometown of Hebron. As a child, he worked in pottery workshops and became fascinated with the different processes associated with its production. Although rooted in his Arab and Islamic heritage, his most popular and lasting work is modern and eclectic in style drawing on both his Palestinian heritage and international experiences including his formative study period in Tiblisi.
Bader was a central and very important figure in the modern Palestinian art movement. He played a major role in the establishment of the League of Palestinian Artists in 1975 and founded Gallery 79 in the late 70s. The Gallery was a hub for cultural activities for much of the 1980s until was forcibly closed by the Israeli Military. He has held 10 solo exhibitions and hence exhibited widely, especially in the early 70s in Hebron and Jerusalem and later individually and with colleagues in Egypt and Japan. Bader passed away in Ramallah in November 2003.