"Chicago in December" Painting

Nora Alshaikh is a contemporary Palestinian artist based in Orlando, Florida, working in large-scale oil painting at the intersection of cultural memory, figuration, and abstraction. Her work maps the persistence of Palestinian cultural fragments — tatreez, Arab architectural traces, and native Levantine flora — within layered, eroded surfaces, constructing a visual space where memory is carried through the body and across generations. Born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian parents, Alshaikh grew up between two landscapes that share a palette, a texture, and a sense of inherited place. When she relocated to the United States in 2021, that distance sharpened everything — unable to fully arrive here or return there, she found herself suspended between worlds, painting not from a place but from the space between places. Her work has been exhibited nationally at The Other Art Fair Chicago and Los Angeles, and locally at CityArts Orlando and the Mount Dora Fine Arts Festival. She was recognized with the Award of Honor at ArtWorks Fine Art Festival, Melbourne, FL, and her work has been featured in a Saatchi Art's Collection. Her upcoming body of work, The 24 Hours In-Between, marks a deliberate pivot inward — from the collective memory of a people to the interior landscape of one life suspended between worlds — contributing a distinctly Palestinian visual voice to the broader American contemporary art conversation.