Lena Kassicieh is a Palestinian-American artist whose practice moves between ceramics, collage, installation, and works on paper to examine how diaspora shapes the material and emotional textures of belonging. Raised across New Mexico, Jordan, and the UAE, she holds a Master of Science in Cultural and Social Anthropology from the University of Amsterdam, and currently lives and works between Dubai and the United States.
Her work departs from the conviction that joy is not incidental to the experience of displacement — it is one of its primary languages. Drawing on archival materials, found objects, and the visual vocabularies of the communities she has inhabited, Kassicieh constructs compositions that hold grief and delight in the same frame: color as emotional processing, playfulness as methodological inquiry, the domestic object as a vessel of collective and personal memory.
Trained as an anthropologist, she approaches her practice as both intimate autobiography and cultural excavation — investigating how objects, photographs, and inherited aesthetics travel across borders and generations, accumulating meaning as they move. The result is a body of work that positions itself at the intersection of fine art and craft, refusing the hierarchies that separate them.
Kassicieh's work has been featured in Vogue Arabia, GQ Arabia, and Architectural Digest Middle East. Her large-scale installations and murals have transformed spaces including Dubai Design District, ICD Brookfield Place, and 25Hours Hotel One Central, and her work has been presented at Dubai Design Week and Amman Design Week.