Yara Awad

My name is Yara Awad. I was born in Damascus, Syria. At age 2, I moved with my family to Saudi Arabia, where I grew up until I graduated from highschool. Solitude was enforced on me by an inevitably oppressive life in Saudi Arabia. Unable to live a typical child’s life, my sister and I were encouraged to paint by our parents. My father gave us our first coloring pens, and my mother became our biggest fan. Though I am a self-taught painter, it is my family who cleared and prepared the learning path for me. In 2012, I moved to Beirut, Lebanon to pursue a college degree at the American University of Beirut. I had been a child who grew up mostly within her bedroom’s four walls, and there I was, thrown in a hyper-active city of raging personalities, drugs, and corruption. It was in Beirut that I experienced true, debilitating displacement, and it was in Beirut that I was twisted and moulded into the social being that I am today. In 2017, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts to start a PhD degree at Boston University. My work and studies are in Computer Science, focused on operating systems, distributed systems, and programmable smart machines. The scientific agendas that have engulfed me during my studies have rewired my brain in a way that made me see things differently, from human life, to inanimate structure, to metaphysical form, and to the daily phenomena that we take for granted. I do not try to replicate reality, or what we believe reality to be, nor do I try to change it. I only aim to show it from a different perspective, a different angle. Solitude, oppression, displacement, grief, and transient blissful hysteria are my fuel, and my world, friends, and family are my muse.