User:Lilkhelil/Lina Lazaar

= Lina Lazaar =

Lina Lazaar was born in 1983 in Riyad. She is a Tunisian art critic and curator. She has organized several major exhibitions devoted to contemporary art in North Africa and the Middle East. She was in charge of organizing the Tunisian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

Biography
Born in 1983 in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), she is the daughter of Kamel Lazaar, a Tunisian financier who was a top executive of Citibank before becoming the founder of Swicorp; he is also an art collector. She grew up in Geneva, Switzerland. Artists from the Arab world were frequently received at the Swiss family home.

She then moved to London to study at the London School of Economics. Her first job in a bank put forward her scientific training. However, in 2006, at age 23, she changed her vocation and chose to join Sotheby's to return to contemporary art. To her this auction housed had a leveraging effect on promotion of contemporary art and designers in North Africa and Middle East. At Sotheby’s, she organizes an auction on art in the Islamic world and, the following year, the first auction of contemporary Arab and Iranian art.

While continuing its activities within Sotheby's until 2016, she organizes The Future of a Promise, a pan-Arab exhibition at the 2011 biennale of Venice in 2011 which echoes the Arab Spring. She founds the Jaou festival in 2013. She also launches Ibraaz, a forum for online literature publication and works of art, supported by her father’s foundation, the Kamel Lazaar Foundation where she serves as Vice-President. She is in addition entrusted with the organization of the first Tunisian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, for which she chooses an atypical form of participation: kiosks and places of performance on the subject of migration.

Private Life
She was married to Hassan Mohammed Jameel from 2011 to 2015. Since 2016, she is married to Ali Munir with whom she has twins.