Touma, Nadine & Merhej, Lena + Chalhoub, Claude

Arts + Children's Book + Comic | Lebanon

Nadine R.L. Touma: "When I was five years old I wrote" The sun is a bowl of milk!" Since then, haunting images, words have inhabited walls, papers, photos, diaries, and now books. My love of life unravels in words becoming stories, stories becoming artworks, artworks becoming books for everyone to relish in their worlds."
Nadine Touma

Nadine Touma is an artist, writer, and filmmaker who lives and works in Beirut. She has created numerous installations, literary works, and artworks. Touma has participated in exhibitions in Lebanon, Egypt, and throughout Europe. She is currently working on a series of books, animations, films, and music for babies, young readers, and young adults in Arabic.

Lena Merhej: Lena is an illustrator and an animator. She has freelanced in various fields, doing independent short films, comic strips, ezines, children books and awareness campaigns. She teaches and gives workshops in animation, illustration, and comic books.

Claude Chalhoub: Born in 1974 in Lebanon, into a family of musicians, Claude was first introduced to the violin by his father, who played the rebeck. When he was eight, his brother gave him his first violin, and he began to play at home with his family, mostly improvising to Arabic music. He then joined the Beirut Conservatory, but as the war in Lebanon led to its closure, Claude was forced to continue his musical studies by himself.

Seemingly, his self-taught technique was good enough to meet academical standards, because at the age of eighteen he was awarded the prestigious Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Scholarship, which enabled him to pursue his studies at the Royal College of Music in London, under the tutorship of Professor Grigory Zhislin and later Rodney Friend. There he was introduced to an extensive repertoire of classical music, not only during classes, but also by listening to symphonic orchestras whenever possible. It wasn’t just classical repertoire he absorbed at the time: living in London, where there is music from every corner of the planet, Claude was exposed to an array of musical cultures. He listened to Indian music, African music, Chinese music, looking for sounds to fuse together.