Muyassar Kurdi
My name Muyassar in Arabic means “to make life easy”
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.
In 2024 Kurdi received the NYFA Womens Fund for Music, American Composer Forum’s Create, and Brooklyn Arts Fund. She was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023, and was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in 2020 as well as a 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC. In April 2025 she performed durational pieces (voice/movement) inside the exhibition by Otobong Nkanga in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
Performance highlights include Poetry Project, Abrons Arts Center, Roulette Intermedium, Center For Performance Research, Lincoln Center, The Rubin Museum of Art, Issue Project Room, Cafe OTO, Chicago Cultural Center, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia, Fridman Gallery, Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, and Judson Memorial Church as well as exhibitions and film screenings at VIERTE WELT (Berlin), Trieze Gallery (Paris), Knockdown Center, Queens Museum, Spectacle Theatre, and Anthology Film Archives (NYC). She taught interdisciplinary workshops most notably at Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, Bilgi University, Cultur (Istanbul), Maysles Documentary Center, and MoMA PS1.