100 years of arty refugees
1920's
Marc Chagall by Oliver Jones
Chagall lived to the age of 97. In his lifetime, he was recognised as one of the great painters of the century. What was his secret?
‘If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.’ More here.
‘If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.’ More here.
Fritz Lang by Cosimo Asvisio
Over the next forty years, Lang would direct 43 films. While his artistic style would progress from German Expressionism and its dramatic depiction of emotions and sensibilities to the bleak and cynical world of American Noir, throughout his career he maintained a fascination with themes of menace and of the overbearing importance of fate in all our lives. More here.
1930's
Marlene Dietrich by Aaron James
America took me into her bosom when there was no longer a country worthy of the name, but in my heart I am German - German in my soul. Marlene Dietrich. More here.
John Heartfield by Niamh Keegan
Between 1932 and 1933 Heartfield distributed his artwork criticising the Nazis during their rise to power as posters he put on the streets of Berlin. This gained him the attention of the Nazi Party and on the 14th of April 1933 the SS broke into his apartment as he packed up to leave. More here.
Josef Herman by Elena Montazemi Safari
Josef Herman was a Jewish-Polish artist. Herman fled from Poland to Britain during the mass persecution of Jews during the Holocaust in 1938. Herman settled in Wales, More here.
Wassily Kandinsky by Iona Neil
Kandinsky is often viewed as the ‘father of abstraction’, and his colour theories are still studied today. Despite multiple periods of upheaval and exile in his life, he still managed to leave a lasting impression on the art of the 20th Century. More here.
Luis Cernuda by Cassia Jefferson
Luis Cernuda was among the Spanish poets writing during the early to mid-20th century. He belongs to the celebrated group of Spanish poets known today as the Generation of 1927. Like many in this group, he was forced into exile following the events of the Spanish Civil War (1936-9) More here.
Lucie Rie by Esme Layton
In Austria, she became well-known for her hand-thrown ceramic, mixing many popular aesthetics of the day, and received an award at the 1937 Paris exposition. More here.
1940's
Eva Frankfurther by Joshua Low
Eva Frankfurther, a German Jew and a talented figurative painter, grew up as a refugee during this era of turmoil. At the age of nine, she fled with her family to England in the late 1930s to avoid Nazi persecution in Germany. More here
Johana Alexandra ‘LOTTE’ Jacobi by Holly Haynes
Johanna Alexandra Jacobi, known popularly as Lotte Jacobi, is recognised as one of the 20th century’s leading portrait photographers of major cultural personalities, as well as for capturing ordinary people in both her country of origin and adopted homeland. More here.
Clarice Lispector by Ruhian Zhu
Clarice Lispector is widely recognized as a Brazilian writer, but fewer people may know that she fled to Brazil from Ukraine with her family due to Russia civil war when she was only one year old. By today’s standards, she may be considered a refugee or asylum seeker. More here
Hans and Margaret Rey by Laura Manning
With the imminent threat to their safety and security, with the possibility of being captured by soldiers and sent to a concentration camp, the Reys decided to bravely flee the city. The situation was desperate as many other people had to suddenly seek safety, making securing transport out of France increasingly hard. More here.
1950's
Robert Vas by Joshua Low
After the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Robert Vas, a BBC film director, sought sanctuary in the UK. He has made many seminal films. His first film, Refuge England (1959), depicts the day in the life of a Hungarian refugee who arrives in England. More here.
Ben Shahn by Isobel Lewis
The USA was gripped by a paranoid belief that threats to the status quo were somehow contagious and had ‘infiltrated’ art. One member of Congress, George Dondero, believed that ‘modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly’. He even prompted an FBI investigation against Shahn, who monitored his studio and threatened him with deportation in 1952. More here.
‘BILLY’ WILDER by Saffron Dale
Billy Wilder (1906-2002) was an Austrian-American filmmaker and screenwriter, renowned for his filmic contributions to the classical Hollywood canon., Wilder won 6 Oscars and received 21 Academy Award nominations. More here.
Vladimir Nabokov by Daniella Sakota
The first major displacement occurred during the Russian Revolution - the Nabokovs were wealthy and involved in liberal rebellion, making them a prime target. They crowded into a Greek cargo ship to make their escape, landing in Athens on Nabokov’s 20th birthday. More here.
Anni Albers by Nicole Dimitrova
Anni Albers' work is characterised by its use of simple forms and patterns, which are often inspired by traditional folk art and craft techniques. She was interested in the relationship between the maker, More here.
1960's
Eva Jiřičná by Mia Taylor
Eva Jiřičná was initially part of an exchange programme and was asked to work for the Greater London Council as an architect. In August of 1968, Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia with 500,000 soldiers. Around 300,000 people feared for their lives, forcing them to flee. This meant leaving their homes, families, and the country of their birth. The crisis was named the Prague Spring. Its legacy echoed in the lives of its displaced artists across the world. More here.
Reinaldo Arenas by Priscilla Otero
Reinaldo Arenas, born in Cuba in 1943, wasn’t always a writer. At the young age of fourteen, Arenas joined the guerilla movements in support of Fidel Castro. ... He wrote his first novel Celestino antes del alba (Singing from the Well) in 1967 . More here.
Vija Celmins by Catherine Cibulskis
Vija Celmins is a celebrated Latvian American artist. Her family fled Riga in 1944, moving between displacement camps before eventually finding passage to the US in 1948. Celmins later revealed: “it wasn’t until I was ten and living in Indiana that I realized being in fear wasn’t normal.” More here.
Thich Nhat Nanh by Hope Chilokoa-Mullen
Exiled from his home country of Vietnam for 39 years, Nhat Hanh consistently advocated for non-violent solutions to conflict. His books and poetry offer wisdom on topics from grief to the climate crisis, and his legacy of engaged Buddhism has helped to share Buddhist teachings with a global audience. More here.
Judith Kerr by Niall Hall
Kerr’s family was Jewish, and her father made them flee in 1933, reaching Switzerland the day before the elections that brought Hitler to power. She was 10 at the time, and later arrived in England as a refugee aged 12. More here.
Isabel Angélica Allende Llona by Alice Garner
After the Chilean government was overthrown by the Pinochet dictatorship, she began to help those on the ‘wanted list’ to escape Chile safely. However, she too soon became part of that list after the assissination of her father’s cousin, Salvador Allende, who was the then Chilean President. She was forced to flee her homeland and lived in exile in Venezuela. More here.
Bessie Head by Isabelle Mills
Bessie started to use her voice in the political sphere. Joining the Pan-African Congress in 1960, mass protest became a way to unite with others against the law requiring Black people to carry passes. More here.
1970's
Hong Dam by Mia Taylor
Internationally celebrated artists have arisen from the depths of this tragedy. Hong Dam was one of them. Resettled in the UK, Dam fled Vietnam at eight years old. More here.
Bob Marley by Sofia Aujla-Jones
To many the name Bob Marley is notorious. Notorious for his contribution to reggae and the Jamaican cultural surgency in the 1960s, for his Rastafarian beliefs, and for his call for love, peace, and equality. However, not many also know that Bob Marley was a refugee. More here.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by Lilya Stewart
Solzhenitsyn used his experiences as an outsider, expelled from his birth country and never quite at home in the United States, to comment on both regimes. His refugee status and political disillusionment enabled him to see past ‘East’ and ‘West’, and explore instead what it means to be simply human. More here.
Freddie Mercury by Rosemary Duffy
“I always knew I was a star. And now, the rest of the world seems to agree with me.” - Freddie Mercury More here
Mahmoud Darwish by Fredric Evans
Darwish was born in 1941 in the village of Al-Birwa in Galilee, Palestine - at the time, under a British mandate. In 1948 he and his family fled in the “Nakba”, an event which displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. More here.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala by Eleanor Stubley
She went on to published 12 novels and novellas in total, 11 short stories and collections and 23 screenplays. She was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards in 1992 and 1993 and won two Academy Awards for her screenplays ‘A Room with a View’ and ‘Howards End’. More here.
1980's
Samia Halaby by Modupeoluwa Omitola
Over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or lost from their homes between 1947-49. This was over half of the pre-war Palestinian Arab population. Samia Halaby and her family were displaced to Lebanon. From there to the US. More here.
Ali Ahmad Said Esber aka Adonis by Ignacio Louzan
Ali Ahmad Said Esber, also known as Adonis, has been said to exert the same influence in the world of Arabic poetry as T.S.Eliot did in the world of anglo-saxon poetry. More here.
Isabel Allende by Francesca Liberatore Vaselli
Isabel Allende is one of the most well-known Latin American female writers. Now aged 79, she has published a multitude of fiction books throughout her life. What few know about her, is that she was also a refugee. Allende had to flee her country not only once, but twice. More here.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode by Alfie Davis
In 1967, the Nigerian civil war broke out, causing over 2 million civilian deaths and leading over 500,000 refugees to flee the country. Rotimi was one of them ... forcing his family to seek refuge in the UK. More here.
Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam (MIA) by Saher Ali
After 26 years of bloodshed, destruction and chaos, the Sri Lankan government defeated LTTE in May 2009. However, by that time, it has left 80,000–100,000 dead, over 300,000 internally displaced and over 145,000 refugees. Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, (known as M.I.A) was one of these refugees. Her unique musical blends of rap and traditional Asian music ... More here.
Nabil Kanso by Eliott Rose
The Lebanese Civil War killed around 120,000 people, with one million fleeing the region. That is one fifth of the pre-war population. Kanso’s dedicated his life work to raising awareness of Lebanese and Middle Eastern conflicts. Art was both a political tool and a method to navigate his own grief. More here.
Mona Hatoum by Esther Coomber
Hatoum’s work has global significance and impact on both people and art itself. She has had solo exhibitions across the world, from Paris to New York. In 2019, Hatoum won the Praemium Imperiale, recognising her lifetime achievement in sculpture. Hatoum is a testament to the global influence that refugee artists can have. More here.
Ke Huy Quan by Lukas Seifert
Quan fled from Vietnam as a child, after his parents made the decision to seek a better life in America after the Vietnam War. Quan, separated from his mother and three of his siblings, spent a year in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, with his father and five other siblings. It was in 1979 that Quan finally made it into America. More here.
1990's
Mila Kunis by Hafeez Merali
As a child refugee, Kunis faced struggles in her early education, not knowing a word of English and knowing little about American culture. She has since said that it felt like “being blind and deaf”. However, she persevered, and her father enrolled her in her first acting classes at age 9, kickstarting her career. More here.
Lucian Freud by Henry Zeris
In 1922, Lucian Freud was born in Berlin and came from a Jewish family. In 1933, Nazi Germany began a more aggressive policy against Jews as Adolf Hitler rose to power. Freud arrived in England as an outsider and unable to speak the language as he began his education at Dartington Hall School. More here.
Mersiha Mesihoivc by Saher Ali
In the 1990's series of wars broke out in Yugoslavia (then known as the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia). The Bosnian war was considered one of the bloodiest ... Mersiha Mesihoivc was a Bosnian refugee who fled to Sweden in 1995. More here.
Wyclef Jean by William Chamberlain
At the age of nine, Jean immigrated to the USA with his family, developing his talent for music in school jazz bands and a teenage rap group. Major success came with the creation of hip-hop trio Fugees. More here.
Alek Wek by Sara Al Soodi
When the civil war started, Alek Wek was 9. Alongside her family, she fled the village. Later on, her mum only sent Alek and her sister to London, both unable to speak English. As she describes, when the war broke out, “Life as we knew it came to a devastating end.” More here.
2000's
Marjane Satrapi by Iurii Shliakov
Marjane Satrapi returns agency to refugees through her stories and shows how the victims of humanitarian crises experience political struggle and how they cope with it. More here.
Hanaa Malallah by Aniya Selvadurai
Malallah developed Ruins Technique while she was living in Iraq in the 1980s. Due to a lack of art material in war turn Iraq, she turned to items that were readily available in her immediate surroundings, such as burnt paper, torn cloth, barbed wire, splintered wood and bullets. More Here.
Ai Weiwei by Jack Bridgford
Since leaving China in 2015, Ai Weiwei’s focus has turned to the refugee crisis. Drawing from his dehumanising experiences as a child in exile, and a now a ‘high end political refugee’, Ai has sought to capture the plight of refugees. More here.
Rita Ora by Kate Blain
An internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter, whose singles have claimed a place in the UK Top 10 thirteen times, she recalls how her parents had to give up everything to start a new life for their family in the U.K. More here.
K'Naan by Hector Worsley
After reciting a poem at a UN convention criticizing their commitment to help Somalia, he released his debut album ‘The Dusty Foot Philosopher’ in 2005 to critical acclaim. More here.
Regina Spektor by Alison Tan
Before she was an internationally renowned singer-songwriter, Regina Spektor was first a refugee from the Soviet Union. At age 9, her family entered the United States, fleeing from anti-Semitic oppression in Russian society. More here.
Khaled Hosseini by Eloise Thompson
Best known for his novels The Kite Runner, a Thousand Splendid Suns, And The Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini is a best-selling author born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965. More here.
Nam Le by Dayoun Song
Le published his first story in 2006 and won numerous literary prizes in the following year. His short story collection The Boat published in 2008 won the Dylan Thomas Prize. More here.
Céline Semaan Vernon by Holly Hart
For Lebanese-Canadian designer Céline Semaan, fashion is not just a frivolous form of self-expression but a symbol of dignity, an expression of autonomy, and most importantly perhaps, a means for activism. More here.
Shaparak Khorsandi by Ellie-May Vohra
Shaparak’s first book, her childhood memoir A beginner’s guide to acting English recounts her experience of adapting to a new culture with the same expert balance of wit and gravitas that she is famed for in her stand up. She broke into mainstream comedy with her sell-out show Asylum Speaker at the Edinburgh fringe festival in 2006. More here.
Mika by Caitlin Darby
Mika won a Brit Award applauding his breakthrough as an artist in 2008 and was nominated for a Grammy that same year. His debut album Life in Cartoon Motion, released in 2007, sold over eight million copies worldwide. More here
Zar Amir Ebrahimi by Eric Balonwu
In Holy Spider, Zar played the role of a fictional investigative journalist uncovering an Iranian serial killer. The film is based on the real-life case of Saeed Hanaei, who killed 16 sex workers from 2000 to 2001 ... More here.
2010's
Ahmad Joudeh by Anna Zhukova
The outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011 left many without a home and claimed the lives of half a million people over the past decade. Ahmad Joudeh was one of the children whose life was severely affected by the conflict. More here.
Michaela DePrince by Rose Poyser
In only 16 years, Michaela DePrince was able to go from neglected orphan to internationally successful ballerina. More here.
Kinan Azmeh & Kevork Mourad by Elena Montazemi Safari
Kinan Azmeh is a Syrian composer and clarinettist. Kevork Mourad is a Syrian-Armenian visual artist. In 2020, Azmeh and Mourad performed an audio-visual performance called Home Within. In this work, art and music create reflection on the Syrian revolution and its aftermath. Rather than following a narrative, the artists document specific moments in Syria’s recent history and reach into their emotional content in a semi-abstract way. More here.
Ocean Vuong by Samuel Moore
Informed by his own distance from his refugee experience, Vuong’s style in both his poetry and prose is nonlinear. Rather than tracking events in chronological order, Vuong seeks to capture disassociated memories and loose sensations. More here.
Hanaa Malallah by Rioghnach Theakston
Hanaa Malallah is an Iraqi artist, researcher and educator based in London since 2006. She fled Iraq when faced with threats from one of the fundamentalist militia groups which managed to gain a foothold in her country in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion. Malallah’s story is one of many, with an estimated 9.2 million Iraqis internally displaced or seeking refuge abroad as of 2021. More here
Itab Azzam by Rachel Rees
Azzam’s work embraces the refugee narrative. She was a producer of BBC2’s 2016 Exodus: Our Journey to Europe, a BAFTA-winning documentary that gave cameras to refugees to chronicle their treacherous passage to Europe. More here.
Basel Zaraa by Maebh Howell
Basel Zaraa is an artist and musician, who uses his experiences of being a refugee, and of coming from a family of refugees, in his work. He was born in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, founded in 1956. Now he lives in the UK. More here.
Emi Mahmoud by Charlie Bowden
Beyond her poetry Mahmoud has received international attention for her activism. In 2015 the BBC named Emi one of the 100 most inspirational women across the world. In 2016 she was one of twelve American Muslims invited to join Barack Obama .. More here.
Eugenia Skvarska by Veronica Corielli
Eugenia Skvarska is an award-winning Ukrainian stylist and artistic director. Before the start of the Russian attack against Ukraine in February 2022, Eugenia had worked as an independent stylist in Kyiv for nine years; she is not even thirty, yet her work has been featured in Harper’s Bazaar and L’Officiel Ukraine, alongside Vogue Italia and Ukraine. More here.
Nalini Malani by Sahar Rajabali
Not only serving as a voice for the millions that were displaced during Partition, Malani is a pioneer in her field. She is being featured in the National Gallery with the exhibition “My reality is Different” which is a curation of her animations, drawn using an iPad. More here.
Mohamad Alhamod by Silvia Andreoletti
His dream is to produce future collections in Jordan, where he says there are communities of Syrian craftsmen who are without work after fleeing the war but were less fortunate than he was, whom he wants to give fair wages and further training. More here.
Hamid Suleiman by Dylan Bilyard
Though trained in architecture, Sulaiman was always more interested in art. He wanted to be an animator growing up before turning to comic books, which were considered neither art nor literature in his home. More here.
Anok Yai by Harini Iyer
In 2017, at Howard University’s homecoming week, Yai’s life underwent a seismic shift. A photograph of her was uploaded to Instagram and secured over 20,000 likes overnight. She quickly became an internet sensation ... . More here.
Viet Thanh Nguyen by Kavan Manouchehry-Vahed
Despite these initial hardships, Viet Tanh Nguyen would go on to excel in the world of academia. Nguyen graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, ... More here.