Samia Halaby (b.1936 in Jerusalem) is a Palestinian-American artist, and scholar living and working in New York. Halaby is a painter who was educated in the 1950s in the American Midwest, at a time when abstract expressionism was popular. While her work is very much in line with American art movements she evolved with, it is consciously enriched by the history of pictorial expression worldwide. Her oeuvre is today central to the study of abstraction within both global and Arabic visual language.

In over six decades Halaby has produced an immense body of work and is a very particular, innovative figure within her generation of artists. As an independent scholar she has contributed to the documentation of Palestinian art of the twentieth century and her writings on art history, pedagogy, and aesthetics have appeared in numerous publications. As an educator, she introduced a groundbreaking undergraduate studio art program to art departments throughout the Midwest and was the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art for nearly a decade.

In 2025, she was honoured the MUNCH Award for artistic freedom. In 2024, the jury of the Biennale Arte in Venice awarded Halaby a Special Mention in recognition of her longstanding work.

Her work is in the collections of MoMA, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Art Jameel Jeddah/Dubai; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; among many others.