Bio

Bisan Nateel (Gaza, 1996),

A Palestinian writer and artist focusing on the intersection of literature and contemporary art by drawing on the Palestinian experience, the memory of place and how the human interacts with it. My experience in studying psychology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza shaped an imaginative approach that combines literary narrative with lived human experience in an attempt to understand the psychological and collective ruptures caused by war and borders.

My projects explore concepts of identity, loss, borders, and collective memory, with a particular focus on individual experiences under conditions of genocide, where the personal becomes a mirror for the collective. I have also coordinated and led youth groups at Tamer Institute for Community Education, creating spaces for expression, writing, and artistic experimentation.

I have published several literary and artistic works, including:

• Luna the Crazy Girl (2022, Tamer Institute): A children’s story about a wide-eyed girl whose imagination brings up questions about the future and the way the world might change, or how it can be seen differently.

• Our House is Our Tree (2024): A collaborative literary and artistic project with artist Majdal Nateel. It tells the story of a house left behind by force yet it has never really left its people. It transforms into a tree that grows in the human memory, extending its branches to touch the essence of the heart in the face of war and destruction.

• How Do We Reconstruct the Story? (2025, Tamer Institute): A book that gathers field observations and narratives from the period of displacement to the south of Gaza. It gives a voice to the stories of children and youth who lost homes, schools, and their safety, tracing the shifting meanings of identity and belonging under a prolonged and complex war. The book also incorporates fragments of the author’s own life, especially her reflections on borders and a homeland weighed down by checkpoints.

• Memory of the Assault (2025, Tabaq Publishing): A documentation of how war reshapes daily life, redefining social and familial ties, and reconfiguring communal resilience in the face of violence and erasure.

Work in progress include:

• The Missing: An art-documentary project exploring the absence of individuals in the context of war and displacement.

• The Man with the Sea Shoes (forthcoming, Gaza Publications): A literary work that contemplates solitude and the search for the heart’s voice amid devastation.

I am also compiling a visual archive of Gaza City as it was before bombardment and the genocide, which will be published as a photo-book that maps its neighborhoods and daily life, reflecting an act of cultural resistance against erasure and a means of preserving living memory. Through text and image, I seek to examine the forces shaping collective and individual existence. I consider the photograph not merely a set of composed elements within a frame but rather a tangible site of lived life, as well as an immersion into memory and experience through which the Palestinian story is continually rewritten to resist falling into oblivion and reclaim presence