Elias Nafaa is an  artist, architect, and researcher working between Montréal and Beirut. Through sculpture, moving-image essays, and archival interventions, he examines how infrastructures of protection can mirror the very violence they claim to avert. Navigating the fragile line where acts of care tip into coercion, Nafaa translates states of emergency into charged material and narrative forms.

A graduate of Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program, he is part of the Public Programs team at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and a 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Fellow (Canada Council for the Arts). His work has been presented at Galerie Tanit (Beirut) and the Institut du monde arabe (Paris), with a forthcoming presentation at Manif d’art, Québec Biennale (Québec City). It is held in the collections of the Institut du monde arabe (Donation Claude & France Lemand), the Dalloul Art Foundation, and the Beirut Museum of Art.





Work in Process Artist-led residency
El Mina, Tripoli, Lebanon
2021

Co-founder, Work in Process Residency (Tripoli), produced by Mophradat. 
Co-founded with Joyce Joumaa and Mona al-Jadir.

Work in Process is a 10-day artist-led residency conceived as an alternative to institution-centered exhibition formats. It foregrounds process over finalized outcomes and explores self-organization as a mode of production. Hosted at Beit el-Nassim in El Mina, Tripoli (Lebanon), the residency sought to create distance from Beirut after the August 4, 2020 port explosion and to decentralize cultural activity beyond the capital, placing artists near local artisans and resources.

Participating artists included Tanya Traboulsi, Mirella Salamé, Noura Bakkar, and Elie Elkhoury.

The project resulted in a publication (PDF), accessible here
© 2026 Elias Nafaa Montréal / Beirut