Born in 1925 in Beyrouth, Etel Adnan was a painter and a writer. She studied philosophy at the Paris Sorbonne in the mid 1950s before continuing her studies at U.C. Berkeley and Harvard. She later taught philosophy at Dominican Collage in San Rafael, California.
Adnan was the author of numerous novels, essays and poems. She also directed the francophone Lebanese Asafa. Painting was the medium through which she found her voice. When she began painting in California, she wrote « I no longer needed to write in French, I was going to paint in Arabic. » Her artistic practice is diverse: poetry, tapestry, ceramics, painting, leporello (accordion books). She used writing and art to approach her personal experience of the war, grief and exile. Known for her abstract representations of mountains, oceans and vivid colors, she found refuge in the beauty of landscape and the quasi-spiritual aspect of tapestry.
In 1977, her novel Sitt Marie-Rose was published in Paris to great renown and translated into 10 different languages. Yet it was only in 2010 that her work began to be exhibited and at the age of 80 could be found in institutions such as the Guggenheim in New York, Mudam in Luxembourg, and the Luma Foundation in Arles. In 2014 she participated in the Whitney Biennial.
In 2020 she was the recipient of the Griffin Poetry Prize for her book Time. Her works are in numerous private collections – notably at the Royal Jordanian Museum, the Sursock Museum of Beyrouth, the Laden Art Museum of Tunis, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the British Museum of London, the World Bank Collection and the National Museum for Women in the Arts of Washington, D.C. Some cartoons of her tapestries are in permanent folders of the Contemporary Crafts Museums of New York and of Los Angeles.