Biography
Yazan Halwani was born in 1993 in Beirut. He began experimenting with graffiti in 2007, inspired by urban culture and French hip-hop, before developing from 2011 onward a distinct mural style rooted in the tradition of Arabic calligraphy. A graduate of the American University of Beirut in computer engineering and Harvard Business School, he built a practice that fuses portraiture and calligraphy — what he calls "calligraffiti" — to pay tribute to major Lebanese and Arab cultural figures.
His monumental murals depicting Sabah, Fairuz, Gibran Khalil Gibran, and anonymous street figures have progressively transformed the walls of Hamra and Gemmayzeh. His approach stems from a conviction: to replace the political portraits saturating public space with faces that unite rather than divide. His work Eternal Sabah, painted on an eight-storey building in Hamra, has become one of Beirut's most photographed murals.
His work has been exhibited at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Barjeel Art Collection (Sharjah), and at biennales across Europe, Africa, and Asia. He received the MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award in 2017 and a gold medal at the Jeux de la Francophonie the same year.
His monumental murals depicting Sabah, Fairuz, Gibran Khalil Gibran, and anonymous street figures have progressively transformed the walls of Hamra and Gemmayzeh. His approach stems from a conviction: to replace the political portraits saturating public space with faces that unite rather than divide. His work Eternal Sabah, painted on an eight-storey building in Hamra, has become one of Beirut's most photographed murals.
His work has been exhibited at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Barjeel Art Collection (Sharjah), and at biennales across Europe, Africa, and Asia. He received the MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award in 2017 and a gold medal at the Jeux de la Francophonie the same year.
The site contains a total of 1 artworks by Yazan Halwani in 1 countries.
