Born in 1986 in Julis, Shanan was exposed to art at home, at exhibitions in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and in her family’s travels to Europe.

She received her bachelor’s degree in 2010 from the art institute of Oranim College and has become an award-winning painter.

Was it unusual for a Druze woman to choose art as a career? Shanan replies, “It is unusual to be an artist in general. But I had the support of my family from the beginning.”

Shanan’s realistic, large-scale oil paintings are infused with a Druze spirit, most famously in her series depicting intricate carpets typical of her village, placed in unexpected contexts.

Often painting from photographs of herself, she suggests fluid definitions of gender, national and ethnic identities through her works.

“It is not only about physicality but also about the meeting of human and nature, a little surrealist,” she tells ISRAEL21c.

Shanan won the 2016 Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where she exhibited solo in 2017. Her works also appeared in other major Israeli museums, at the Art Dusseldorf international art fair in 2018 and at the Armory Show in New York City in 2019. She has participated in residency programs in New York, California and Tel Aviv.

She’s now “working day and night” in her Tel Aviv studio preparing for a show at Dittrich & Schlechtriem Gallery in Berlin, where she had a solo show of self-portraits in 2019.

“Today I’m happy to see that my success is affecting lots of young people who want to study art because of me.”