Juliana Seraphim is a pioneer Palestinian artist who was born in Jaffa in 1934. She was displaced in 1948 during the Nakba, moving to Beirut at the age of 14 with her family. At 18, she began working as a secretary at UNRWA while attending evening art classes with Lebanese painter Jean Khalifé, who organised Seraphim’s first exhibition in his studio. She then enrolled at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1959, she spent a year in Florence before moving to Madrid in 1960 to study for a year at the Royal Academy of San Fernando.
Known for her unique surrealist style and dreamlike iconography, she engaged with gender struggle, the liberation of female sexuality and agency, nature and spirituality and produced some of her most notable works between the 1960s and 1990s.
During the Lebanese Civil War, she moved between Paris and Beirut and represented Lebanon at several international biennials, including Alexandria (1962), Paris (1963 and 1969), and São Paulo (1965). More recently, her work was included in Beirut and the Golden Sixties at the Lyon Biennale in 2022, alongside Etel Adnan and Huguette Caland.
Her work is held in public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Museum of the City of Viareggio, the Musée du Surréalisme in Paris, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman, the Sursock Museum in Beirut, the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut, and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah.