About

Nadine Abou Zaki is a Lebanese-French multidisciplinary artist, writer and director whose work explores touch, perception, darkness, and the relationship between the body, the artwork and the viewer.

At the core of her practice is a questioning of the dominance of sight in the experience of art. Working in total darkness, she sculpts blindfolded, allowing touch to guide the emergence of form through a direct bodily encounter with matter. In her interactive performances and exhibitions Please Touch (Prière de Toucher), visitors are invited to move beyond looking and experience sculpture through touch, often in darkness. Her work on tactility was featured in Contemporary Art and the Discovery of the Value of Tactility, published by the Omero National Museum in Ancona, Italy.

Her practice extends into performance, theatre and participatory work. She wrote and directed the dance-theatre performance The Diary of a Mulberry Tree, received a grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) for Elephant in the Dark, an immersive blindfolded walking performance, and developed Perceptions, a theatre project with blind and Deaf participants.

Questions of perception, disability and access to art have become an integral part of her work. In 2018, she launched Doors. Please Touch, a pioneering cultural accessibility project in Lebanon developed with museums and cultural institutions to create new ways for people with disabilities to encounter art through tactile, sensory and accessible forms of mediation.

In 2017, she founded Red Oak, a non-profit organization active in Lebanon and France, developing projects at the intersection of art, education, mental health and cultural inclusion.

Her artistic practice is informed by a longstanding engagement with philosophy and research. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Sorbonne–Paris IV. Her research focuses on haptic aesthetics and the relationship between museums, accessibility and disability. She holds a certification in artistic mediation from the Institut National d’Expression, de Création, d’Art et de Transformation (INECAT – Art & Thérapie) in Paris and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Dramatherapy at Université Paris Cité.

Her sculptures and performances have been presented in Lebanon and internationally, and her monumental works are installed in public spaces in Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. She is a member of the Lebanese National Commission for UNESCO and was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of National Education.