Tania El Khoury

Tania El Khoury (born 1982) is a Lebanese live artist.

It presented the reconstructed oral histories of 10 men and women who died between 2011 and 2013, and were buried not in public cemeteries, but in the back gardens of ordinary homes.

Her work was also recognised with the Total Theatre Award for Innovation and the Arches Brick Award in 2011.

It led to an accompanying book, published by Tadween in 2016.

El Khoury is the co-founder of the Dictaphone Group, with architect and urban planner Abir Saksouk.

In 2017, she was winner of the ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival International Prize for Live Art, the only international award for live art, attracting a EUR30,000 prize.

Her work has been translated into multiple languages and shown in 32 countries across six continents.

She is also visiting professor and festival curator at Bard College.

Her work has involved creating immersive performances in many different sites, ranging from the great hall at the British Museum to an old church in Beirut once used as a military base during the civil war.

Her exhibition, Gardens Speak, considered the Syrian uprising against the Assad regime.

In 2018, a survey of her work entitled "ear-whispered by Tania El Khoury" took place in the city of Philadelphia, USA, organized by Bryn Mawr College and supported by Pew Center for the Arts and Heritage.

She completed a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, focusing on interactive live art after the Arab uprisings, supervised by Professor Harriet Hawkins and supported by a scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Prior to this, she earned an MA (with distinction) in Performance Making at Goldsmiths, University of London and a BA in Fine Art from the Lebanese University, Beirut.

El Khoury was selected as a 2019 Soros Arts Fellow, where 11 of the selected artists, filmmakers, curators and researchers whose work involved immigration were granted US$80,000 each "to realize an ambitious project over the next 18 months."