Feda Eid is a Lebanese diaspora photographer and multidisciplinary artist living in the occupied lands of Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusett People- greater Boston. Her work explores the expression of identity and tradition in the often tense but beautiful space between, what is said, what is felt, and what is lost in translation. Feda is guided by her family’s journey and her childhood growing up as an Arab and Muslim in the US. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment, and pop culture linking the past and present. She uses ritual and the everyday as portals to reimagine, and project interconnected and liberated futures.

Feda studied Sociology at Regis College and photography at New England School of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Lesley University, and The Shed NY among others. She was 2019 Luminary and Visiting Studio Artist at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2022 Artist in Residence at Mass MoCA Studios, 2022 Collective Futures Fund grantee, and 2024 Foundation For Contemporary Arts grantee. She was most recently awarded the 2024-2027 Studio Residency at Boston Center for the Arts and WBUR’s 2024 The Makers, Boston’s 10 artists of color whose work you should know.

IG @fedaeid

LEARN MORE

Growing up I felt the constant tension of cultures colliding, between the world my parents fled, and the world I created in my bedroom. I loved to play dress up and experiment with my older sister’s drugstore makeup in a plastic grocery bag on her bed. I would sneak into my mothers drawers looking for scarves to “borrow”, the swirling embroidery of her abayas and my dads traditional collared robes. Textiles started to embed into my mind, mixed with mountain landscapes and the scent of jasmine, memories of summers spent in Lebanon. The fertile
crescent, the land of ancient cedar and olive trees, pomegranates, and of my grandmother’s patterned couch cushions she sewed by hand. Almost everything in her home was made with her special touch.

This collision of worlds, past and present, and the painful tension of growing up Arab and Muslim in a place where both are dehumanized and disposable, art became and continues to be both a way to process that pain and transform it into something handmade.

The ornamental and ritual have always been deeply rooted within me. It flows through me in the ways it flowed through my ancestors, as a channel into the spiritual. The everyday becomes portals of revelation, of the Divine, of resistance. To reimagine..project..and create the interconnected and liberated futures of collective ancestral visions. Honoring all that nourishes, seen and unseen, that guide us in all the ways of Seeing.