About Tala Akkawi — Queer Palestinian Architect & Artist

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I am many places at once.

Lebanese. Iraqi. Palestinian. British. Queer. Female. Neurodivergent. Architect. Artist.

My brain sees the world differently: dyslexic, autistic, and fiercely visual. I think in images, patterns, and structures before words. Perhaps that is why art became my language.

I cannot sit by and watch injustice. My work bears witness — to occupation, displacement, erasure, and resistance. To the places that made me and the ones being unmade.

I work with raw, unforgiving materials; concrete, welded steel, found objects. Their brutality is intentional. It mirrors the weight of the subjects I am compelled to depict. My architectural training lives in every piece: in the structure, the load, the form. In understanding how things are built, and how they collapse.

Immersion is everything. Hands in the work. This is how my neurodivergent brain engages most fully; a rare stillness inside the noise of the world.

This work lives at the intersection of belonging and exile, beauty and grief, resistance and restoration.

For justice. For Palestine. For all the unnamed — and for every voice that refused to stay silent.