Samia Halaby (Palestinian-American, b. 1936) is an abstract painter who pioneered computer-programmed kinetic painting, animating abstractions with code she wrote on a Commodore Amiga from the mid-1980s.,Born in Jerusalem, she was displaced with her family during the 1948 Nakba before eventually settling in the United States.Her nearly six-decade practice spans oil and acrylic painting, kinetic digital art, and activism around Palestinian rights and social justice.,
She earned an MFA from Indiana University in 1963 and later became the first full-time female associate professor at Yale School of Art.,After encountering early computing through IBM machines and MIT's Sketchpad program, she bought a Commodore Amiga 1000 in the mid-1980s. She spent three years teaching herself to program in BASIC and C, producing a body of work she called Kinetic Paintings that fused geometric abstraction with motion and sound.She has described programming as simply another kind of brush, and traces her visual language to the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, and Islamic art history, alongside a Marxist view of abstraction as a working-class art form.,
Her work has entered the collections of Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim.In 2024 she received a Special Mention from the jury at the Venice Biennale.She was included in the group exhibitions “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991” at Mudam Luxembourg and Kunsthalle Wien and “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” at Tate Modern, both surveying early computer art.,That same year, a survey of her work co-organized by the Broad Art Museum of Michigan State University and the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University was partially canceled after Indiana University withdrew its portion following her pro-Palestinian statements, a decision later cited by the National Coalition Against Censorship as an example of institutional censorship of artists.,
In 2025 Oslo's Munch museum awarded her the Munch Award for Artistic Freedom.In 2026 her work was included in the “we refuse_d” exhibition at the Mathaf during the inaugural Art Basel Qatar.She was also selected for the 2026 Whitney Biennial.Her work featured in the inaugural exhibition of the Palestine Museum's Edinburgh outpost, Europe's first museum dedicated to contemporary Palestinian art.
