Born and raised in the UAE, Dina Fawakhiri returned to her native Amman to earn a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design in 1997 and began working in advertising soon after. Fifteen years later, Dina left the industry as Creative Director to one of Jordan’s most prominent agencies, with numerous awards to her name to pursue a freelance career as an Illustrator. As a young artist, Dina’s favorite medium was pencil on paper, preferring black and white to color, with smooth rounded lines and perfect forms. But the fast-paced, commercially driven advertising world eventually influenced her work as an artist. Inspired by the ease and speed of digital illustration, Dina’s lines got simpler, cleaner, bolder and faster. She began experimenting with color and found herself drawn to digital art as a new medium that lent itself to surrealist conceptual exploration. One of Dina’s first memorable dalliances with the arts was at age eight, when she painstakingly created miniature cereal boxes for her Barbie. Barbie herself may not have appreciated the great lengths Dina had gone to in order to ensure the boxes’ accuracy, but her incredible patience, appreciation for perfect forms and labor-intensive attention to minute details were all indicative of a budding signature style that would continue to inform Dina’s creative processes to this day.