Sami Zarour is a visual artist who was born in Ramallah and studied visual art at the University of Jordan. While oil painting is at the heart of his practice, he also experiments with printmaking, embroidery, and sculpture. In his recent paintings, he has been moving toward a more surreal approach, where oversized figures appear in familiar Palestinian cityscapes and urban spaces. Themes of presence and absence, belonging and distance, and the connection to home have become recurring threads in his work.
His first exhibition, Split Second (Viljandi, Estonia, 2017), combined painting and dance video art in an interactive installation. He has exhibited in Palestine and internationally, including La Palestine Comme Métaphore (Gallery M, Paris, 2025), Echoes of the Land (Almaamal, Jerusalem, 2025), Oh, Impossible Take My Hand (Lawyeh Gallery, Ramallah, 2019), A Story That Begins and Ends with a Lie (KH7 Artspace, Aarhus, 2018), and Spaces (Arty, Ramallah, 2017).
Zarour also works in film. His short film The Pipe (2019), which addresses themes of imprisonment, screened at festivals worldwide and won Best Short Film at Festival Ciné-Palestine in Paris. He also works as a set decorator for Palestinian and international feature films, collaborating with directors such as Annemarie Jacir, Muayad Alayan, Basil Khalil, and Ameen Nayfeh. Earlier, he led the construction of a large-scale model of Emwas, a Palestinian village destroyed in 1967, for the documentary Emwas… Restoring Memories (2016). He is based between France and Palestine.