Born in Salame, Jaffa, in 1938; was also known as Sheikh Al-Fannanin (‘The Master of Artists’); after the 1948 Nakba, ended up with his family in Damascus; completed his higher studies in 1964; studied Sculpture at the College of Fine Arts in Cairo; attended the Luxor Atelier for Postgraduate Studies; his art included paintings, graphics, murals, illustrations, cover designs and etchings; specialized in graphic art and sculpture and was called by some critics “icon of contemporary Arab graphic arts;” lived in Beirut and Damascus; contributed to define fan al-muqawama (the art of resistance); lost 25,000 of his prints in the Israeli attacks on Beirut in 1982 but managed to save the wood and masonry cuts he used to make them; was a founding member of the trade union committee of the General Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists, and a member of the Managing Committee of the General Union of Palestinian Abstract Artists in Syria; laid the foundation for an art gallery, which opened in the memory of Naji Ali in 1987 in Damascus; his famous Self-Portrait as God, the Devil, and Man was inspired by ancient Canaanite legends, folk tales, and Palestinian cultural icons, and is a sequence of pictorial narratives which had reached 114 meters at the time of his death, summarizing the history of the Palestinian people from 11 th Century BC to the present; won several local and international awards and prizes; died in Dec. 2002 in Damascus, while trying to rescue his works from a fire that destroyed his studio; was buried in Al-Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Damascus.

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Added: June 2006