Zeina Barakeh

Zeina Barakeh (b. Beirut) is a Palestinian-Lebanese artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Exhibitions and film festivals include: Poetry is Not a Luxury, The Center for Book Arts, New York City; Silent Narratives, Yinchuan MOCA, Yinchuan, China; Preoccupations: Palestinian Landscapes, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Another Hole in the Head (15th), New People Cinema, San Francisco; The Shape of Birds: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa, Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island; Kerry Film Festival (19th), Killarney Co. Kerry, Ireland; Altered, Gallery106, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; PHOTOFAIRS SF, Connected: The Channel of Democracy: Womanhood, Power & Freedom in Video Art, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco; Blue Plum Animation Festival (13th), Johnson City, Tennessee; Detritus, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose; What Makes Us?, Focus Gallery, Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey; Harlem International Film Festival (11th), MIST Harlem, New York City; Creation Stories, Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters Gallery, New Jersey; Bring It Home: (Re)Locating Cultural Legacy Through the Body, San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, San Francisco; PULSE New York, Art Fair, New York City; UNTITITLED, Art Fair, Miami Beach, Florida; Editions/Artists’ Book Fair, New York City; International Film Awards Berlin, KINO im Kulturhaus Spandau, Berlin; The Chasm Arena, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Women Redrawing the World Stage, SOHO20 Chelsea Gallery, New York City; The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, New Jersey; The Third Half, The Public Theater, New York City; Facettes, Espace SD, Beirut. Residency awards include: Perspectives: Here and There, Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, Rutgers University, New Jersey; and Vermont Studio Center.

In 2022, Catharine Clark Gallery featured Barakeh’s Wild Cards, a presentation of video animations and works on paper in the gallery’s Media and Viewing Rooms. The title of Barakeh’s exhibition references both the unpredictability of war, as well as ID cards and credit cards that are connected to warfare. Her video, Homeland Insecurity (2016), for example, draws on current events that illustrate the mechanisms of war, as well as the history of cotton as a core resource in the economic growth and spread of Empire from the Islamic Era through the Crusades, and from slavery into the present. Wild Cards was exhibited alongside Al Farrow’s New Sculptures and Masami Teraoka’s The Last Swan Lake. In 2024, Barakeh, Al Farrow, and Teraoka exhibited together once again in a presentation titled What’s at Stake at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon.

Barakeh worked for numerous years at the San Francisco Art Institute, with her last position being Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs. She currently teaches art at Cal State East Bay university as a lecturer.