About the Artist
Ali El-Chaer (b. 1995, they/he) is a trans diasporic Palestinian writer, illustrator, and artist, currently living in New Jersey. They received their bachelors in fine arts at Austin Peay State University in 2018 and is a MFA for Design candidate at Rutgers University. They have shown in numerous group exhibitions, including: Moving, Transfer at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, OH (2024); Watermelon Seeds at Begonia Labs at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN (2024); We Are Sorry to Inform You That, curated by Adele Jarrar for MNFA gallery in Amman, Jordan (2022); Queer Identity at the The Dirty Spread Collective, Bristol, UK (2022); The Divine: Beyond the Bounds of Queerness at the Nepantla Cultural Arts Gallery, Seattle, WA (2022). They were also selected as a resident artist for the Bethany Artist Community in New York in 2024 and he was selected by South Arts to represent Tennessee as a fellow for the 2024-2025 National Leader of Color cohort by Arts Lead.
El-Chaer has a wide variety of professional experience. They were commissioned to write the Olives Are Beautiful article for CedarHill Homestead, Springfield, TN (2023) and they were chosen to be the Editor for Heaven Replied anthology published by Renascence Books in Nashville, TN (2024).
They were also commissioned by the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York to illustrate the Love Letters folio publication in 2023, and they were selected by University of Syracuse to have their illustration included in Issue 48 of the Salt Hill Journal. In addition, El-Chaer has also worked as an archive assistant for Tennessee State Archives.
El-Chaer has gone on to found a community collective, Nour Nashville, catering towards political education, organizing, and outreach in Nashville, TN. He has been nominated and awarded the Press On Southern Movement Media Fund for his work within Nour Nashville and their use of journalistic and artistic practices to help Palestinians in Gaza during the ongoing genocide.
El-Chaer’s present artistic practice and research has transitioned into tackling intense interpersonal emotions around the ongoing Palestinian genocide and continued displacement, pulling from archived political posters from the Levant Region from 1913-present and Byzantine art.
Ali El-Chaer علي الشاعر 