Samer Mohdad was born in 1964 in Bzebdine, Lebanon, to a father who was an engineer and a mother who was a poet. After the Lebanese Civil War broke out, his adolescence was marked by bombs, exile fighting, and the death of close friends and acquaintances.
Mohdad studied photography at L’École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc Liège, Belgium; he earned a B.S.A. in communications at Université de Liège, Belgium, in 1990, and a M.S. in visual communications at Capitol University, Seattle, in 2006. He worked as a photographer and author with Agence Vu, Paris, from 1988-2001, during which time his work was published in numerous international magazines and newspapers. In 1997 in Beirut, with the help of Fouad Elukhoury and Akram Zaatari, he created the Association for Preservation of Arab Photography (now Fondation Arabe pour l’Image), an archive of the Arab photography that was then unknown to photography museums in the West. Since 2001, he has worked for various prestigious photography-related organisations in Europe and Lebanon as a communications expert project manager, liaison, and advocate for local populations in the Arab world and Africa, using photography and motion pictures as a medium of communication.
For the last twenty-five years, Mohdad has shown the Arab world from the inside. He is the author of six books: War Children: Lebanon 1985-1992 (Lausanne, Switzerland: Musée de l’Elysée, 1993); Return to Gaza (Lausanne, Switzerland: Musée de l’Elysée, 1996); Mes Arabies (Heidelberg: Umschau/Braus, 1999); Assaoudia (Arles: Actes Sud, 2005); Mes Ententes (Beirut: Arab Images Foundation 2005); and Beirut Mutations (Arles: Actes Sud, 2012). His recent solo exhibitions include Accomplished Visions: The Arabs (2011) and Beirut Mutations (2013) at the Mark Hachem Gallery in Beirut. His photographic essay Assaoudia was shown at the MENASArt Fair, Beirut, in 2011, and his work was included in Generation War, an exhibition at the 2013 Beirut Art Fair featuring photographs by six Lebanese photojournalists born in the 1960s. He is the winner of the 2011 Pioneer Photographer Award from the National Geographic Society All Roads Photography program.
http://www.mohdad.arabimages.com
http://www.arabimages.com/AIF.php
http://2014biennial.fotofest.org
