Mohamad Al Rawas

Mohammad El Rawas is a pioneering Lebanese painter, sculptor, and printmaker, born in Beirut in 1951. He graduated with a degree in painting from the Institute of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University in 1975. Amid the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, El Rawas fled with his family—first to Damascus, then to Morocco in 1976—where he worked as an art instructor at the École Normale Supérieure de l’Enseignement Technique in Rabat. He returned to Beirut in 1979.

That same year, he was awarded a scholarship by the Lebanese University to pursue an MFA in printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, where he graduated in 1981. Upon his return to Lebanon, he began teaching at the Institute of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University, a position he held from 1982 to 2009. He also taught at the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut from 1992 to 2004.

El Rawas served as Secretary-General of the Association of Lebanese Artists from 1982 to 1992 and is a founding member of the Syndicate of Lebanese Artists.