About Fadwa Al Qasem

I was born in Tripoli, Libya, to Palestinian parents — which means displacement was written into my story before I could read. I have moved many times since. Each country left something in me and took something away. I have learned not to look for home in places.

The page is my home. The canvas, the journal, the manuscript; these are the places I return to when everything else shifts.

I am a Palestinian-Canadian mixed media artist and bilingual author, currently living and creating in Calpe, on the Costa Blanca in Spain, where I converted my garage into a studio and began again. I hold a BA in English Literature and Art Therapy Certificates; both of which live quietly in everything I make.

I paint women; clothed and unclothed, defiant and tender, political and intimate. I work with found materials: vintage book pages, yarn, fabric, text. I am drawn to surfaces that have already lived a life, that carry history in their grain. I circle words, isolate them, transform them. I draw the female body on top of what was already there. The body and the text speak to each other. They always have.

I write in English and Arabic. I make fibre art that demands to be touched. I give talks. I perform. I translate. I make children's books because children deserve stories that see them. My first novel "When Birds Still Sing" is currently seeking a publisher. 

In 2012 I visited Palestine for the first time; eight days that I have never fully left. I stood at the Allenby Bridge with my Canadian passport and my Palestinian name, entered my own country as a tourist, crocheted in a waiting room while officers questioned me, and cried when I finally reached Jerusalem. I wrote about it. I always write about what matters.

My work does not look away from difficult things. But it also insists on joy, on tenderness, on beauty as a form of resistance.
Because making beautiful things in difficult times is not an escape. It is a position.

I am the creator of the I Am What I Art Manifesto: a declaration of creative liberation and a refusal to be contained by expectation.

[email protected] — studio visits by appointment — Calpe, Spain

Awards & Recognition
2026 — Jodi Stutz Award in Poetry, Toyon Multilingual Literary Magazine, Cal Poly Humboldt, California — for the poem "Someone Said This Land Has No People"
Poetry translated into French and Italian
Short stories published in Akhbar Al Adab (Cairo), Al Adab Magazine (Beirut), the Literary Supplement of Al Bayan (UAE), Al Quds (Jerusalem), Al Quds Al Arabi (London) and An-Nahar (Lebanon)
Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature, Dubai — 2014 and 2015
Fadwa's Values

​PLAY
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Art without play is just work. I make room for joy, spontaneity and delight in everything I create. Creativity should feel like liberation, not labour.
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​INSPIRATION

I am inspired by women who refuse. By stories that survive. By the stubborn human insistence on beauty even in the darkest of times. I try to pass that on.

STRENGTH

Not the loud kind. The kind that gets up quietly, makes something, and keeps going. The kind that knows the difference between bending and breaking.

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CONNECTION 

I believe in solidarity. In the radical act of truly seeing another person. In art as a bridge between lives that would otherwise never touch.

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FREEDOM

To choose. To create. To speak. To be seen without permission. To move through the world without fear. This is what I make art about. This is what I make art for.