Ahmed Muhanna

Ahmed Muhanna is a 38-year-old visual artist and a children’s arts therapy specialist.

He’s been interested in art since a kid and worked on his own until he was able to study fine arts at Al-Aqsa University, where he graduated with a fine arts degree in 2006.

Mahna worked as an art facilitator at Al-Qattan Foundation, helping young children use art as a tool for psychological therapy.

During the first three months of the genocide, in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, he didn’t create any artwork. However, after a while, he decided to keep going and continue on his lifelong journey with a creative practice. He started creating new personal pieces to reflect the suffering around him and in 2024 he also started doing art therapy for his community.

“I go to the centers for sheltering the displaced and share with the children artistic works that have an effect in reducing the severity of fear, anxiety and tension. Children are in dire need of expressing their hopes, ambitions and demands through drawing and visual arts.”

For his own art during the genocide, Ahmed wanted to depict moments from everything happening in Gaza – depicting the impact on his fellow Palestinians amidst displacement, starvation, and more.

Using the supplies he had available, at one point Ahmed started creating work on aid boxes.

“The combination of artistic drawings and food aid cartons represents a kind of artistic philosophy, especially since we only see these food parcels during the war. And the paintings --they relate to scenes of daily suffering in war.”

In Fall 2025, there was a traveling art exhibition of of Ahmed's work across nine European cities, put on by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). It featured dozens of his pieces painted by him on food aid boxes.

WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian organization and had seen the work he was making on their aid parcels. They received funding from the European Union for the traveling show.

“I feel as though I’m sending a piece of Gaza to the world. These works aren’t just colors, they are living messages that carry our pain, our resilience, and our small dreams for peace and freedom. It’s my way of saying: ‘We are here… we are still alive, and we still dream.’”

Since that exhibition ended, Ahmed has started a new series called Blue Space.

“Blue Space is an art project that explores the perplexing relationship between the tangible ‘blue’ of Gaza—an enclosed, shrinking physical space—and the digital ‘blue’ of social media, a seemingly vast yet deceptive virtual world. Through this intersection, the project reveals the maze Gazans navigate between a horizonless reality and a virtual realm with no real impact, striving to transform blue from a space of loss into a space of visual and existential resistance.