Palestinian artist Samia Halaby receives 2025 Munch Museum Award for artistic freedom

Samia Halaby, a Palestinian abstract artist based in New York, has been selected for the 2025 Munch Museum Award. The NOK 300,000 prize recognizes artistic freedom of expression. Halaby's six-decade career blends Islamic geometry with Russian avant-garde and Western modernism. Born in Jerusalem in 1936, she was displaced from Palestine at age 11. She earned an MFA from Indiana University in 1963 after studying abstract expressionism in the American Midwest. In 1986, she began creating digital kinetic paintings using self-taught coding on an Amiga computer. The jury commended her visionary practice and decades of advocacy against censorship. Halaby taught for ten years as the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art. She also helped establish undergraduate studio art programs across Midwestern institutions. Her 2002 book Liberation Art of Palestine documents 20th-century Palestinian art. A retrospective at Indiana University Bloomington was canceled last year due to unspecified safety concerns, which many attributed to political reasons. The award ceremony will occur on October 22 in Paris during Art Basel and on October 24 at the Munch Museum in Oslo. The award was announced on September 16.