The award winning Lebanese Artist Zeina Nader was born in Lebanon in 1973. She graduated from the Saint Joseph University in Beirut in 1996 with a degree in Communication Arts.
Instead of pursuing her promising career in the fields of theatre, cinema, and photography, she chose to adopt her initial love and passion: Painting.
What started out as a hobby, painting on all kinds of materials (porcelain, wood, leather, fabric, etc.) slowly became a professional career of painting on canvas. Her familiarity with oil, acrylic, charcoal, watercolors and different media propagated her even more deeply into the world of art.
Her main inspirations were impressionists and figurative artists, and that contributed to finding her path in abstract painting, with many tales to tell and infinite vibrations to create.
Zeina exhibited her work all around the world in cities such as New York, Montreal, Paris, London, Madrid, Milano, Monaco, Bruges, and Copenhagen to name a few.
She is also an author and published books about her art and travels in Italy. She speaks 5 languages.
She is inspired by everything and anything around her. Her “synesthesia “ was behind a recent exposition which carried that same name displaying 15 paintings of vivid colors inspired by events in her life.
Her latest project in collaboration with Dr. Tony Karam digs into the furthest depths of synesthesia, transforming music and its emotions onto colors on canvas.

Artist’s statement:

SYNESTHESIA

Ever since I was a little girl, I associated everything I sensed with a color, a tonality or a shape that only exists in my imagination. Numbers, letters, months, even weekdays… Each had one particular color.
Colors helped memorize things easier, and despite my artistic mind, that’s how I was good at mental calculations! And intuitively, I used colors to help me learn different languages.
The music, mostly classical, has always been a correlation of entangled lines and flashes of colors. That’s how I got accustomed to listening to rainbows. Every incident that has ever happened to me, be it good or bad, was also an intensive amount of colors bursting onto my mind. I even associated people with colors, it’s not that I saw them red or blue skinned, but in my brain their different images were specific to a different color.
As a child, I was convinced that everybody else listened, smelled, touched and felt colors, just as I do. I thought we all had the same perceptions, mix up of sounds, feelings and emotions associated with shapes and colors.
However, I later on found out that it wasn’t a common thing. I did my research and asked professionals about it, only to end up realizing that this was a rare case, contracted by less than 2% to 4% of the population, without being involved in drugs or suffering from brain damage. It’s known as “Synesthesia”.
Throughout my adult life, I became fully aware of my case, and that helped me understand that I sensed life differently from others. Life was beautiful and colorful, but the loneliness I endured because of my perceptions and obsession with colors, made it rather
difficult sometimes.
This gave me the ability to do art, even if indirectly. I started to paint at a very young age, because it was the easiest and most obvious way for me to express myself. And when I discovered my path in abstract art, I began my journey of sharing my crazy sense of colors.
Today, I embrace this case of mine, it’s a pleasant and a rather uncommon way of experiencing life, even though my brain plays different tricks on me, but I happen to make the most out of them.
I dig deep within my soul, and create the craziest of arts.
Definition of “synesthesia” by Merriam-Webster: A concomitant sensation especially: a subjective sensation or image of a sense (as of color) other than the one (as of sound) being stimulated