Soraya Abu Naba’a was born in 1985 in Melbourne, Florida, at the meeting point of diverse cultural currents that would go on to shape her life and her art. Her father was Palestinian and her mother Lebanese, though born in the Dominican Republic, a lineage as layered and complex as the works she would later create. Though American by birth, it was in the lush, tropical streets of Santo Domingo that Soraya spent her formative years, absorbing the colors, rhythms, and contrasts of the Caribbean landscape. It is perhaps from this early exposure to cultural multiplicity that she draws her gift for weaving the inner and outer worlds into a single, fluid reality.

At the age of eighteen, Soraya left for Paris, a city that would deepen her connection to both tradition and transformation. She studied French language and civilization at the Sorbonne before enrolling at the Paris American University, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2007. Her academic path was enriched by hands-on experience through internships at the Enrico Navarro Gallery in Paris and the Gary Nader Art Gallery in Miami. These early encounters with curatorial and gallery practices offered her not only professional insight but also a wider artistic vocabulary. Her journey continued through a sculpture course at the Accademia di Arti in Florence, followed by an intensive painting program at Columbia University in New York, and ultimately culminated in a Master’s degree in Painting from the Royal College of Arts in London in 2016.

Soraya’s art evokes an interior cosmos in constant bloom. In her floral series, meticulously rendered dreamscapes unfold with astonishing detail, florid visions that verge on the surreal yet remain rooted in the sensual and organic. Her works are less representations than revelations, each canvas a stage where imagination, discipline, and emotion converge. She refers to her creative process as an outburst, a term that captures both the spontaneity and the introspective depth of her practice. For Soraya, the boundaries between nature and self, between universe and gesture, dissolve into a multidimensional expression that is at once personal and profoundly universal.

Her career has been marked by both prolific output and critical acclaim. She has participated in over forty group exhibitions, four biennials, and twenty solo shows in renowned galleries across the globe, including Gary Nader Art Centre in Miami, La Galleria in London, and the Royal Houses Museum in the Dominican Republic. Her work, collected privately in cities as diverse as Miami, New York, Santo Domingo, Istanbul, Amman, Geneva, and Toronto, resonates across continents and cultures. Each exhibition seems to affirm her capacity to speak to a shared human impulse, the search for beauty, for meaning, and for transformation through art.
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Since 2009, Soraya has lived and worked between Santo Domingo and Miami, continuing to build bridges between her cultural heritage and her contemporary vision. In her world, the garden is not merely a motif but a metaphor for inner growth, for layered identity, for the ever-blooming possibilities of creation. Her practice reminds us that in the interplay of roots and reinvention lies the essence of art itself, a space where memory flowers into form and where imagination becomes the truest home.