About Kevork
Kevork Mourad was born in Kameshli, Syria, received his degree from the Yerevan Institute of Fine Art, and now lives in New York. A painter and video artist, he has performed his animated and live visuals at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Dutch Royal Palace for the Prince Claus Foundation, and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. His work is held in the permanent collections of Paris’s Institut du Monde Arabe, the Spurlock Museum, and the Aga Khan Museum, where his large-scale piece Seeing Through Babel was added in 2023. A longtime member of the Silkroad Ensemble, he is featured in Morgan Neville’s documentary The Music of Strangers, and received the Robert Bosch Stiftung prize in 2016 for his short film Four Acts for Syria. He has exhibited widely across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, including at the Asia Society Triennial (2020) and Art Basel Miami (2025), and is represented by galleries including Galerie Tanit (Beirut), Studio La Città (Verona), Galerie Dominique Fiat (Paris), and Leila Heller Gallery (New York). He is a recipient of a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts grant and was a 2024 Fountainhead residency fellow.
CBA Project
Conference of the Birds
This residency will support Kevork Mourad in the development of a multidisciplinary piece incorporating dance, live painting, and animation, based on the Persian mystical poem Conference of the Birds. Two to six dancers will interact with and inhabit Mourad’s live drawing, with the projection functioning as both stage design and environment for the performers. Mourad has chosen to work with Conference of the Birds for its resonance with contemporary audiences as a search for truth and beauty in personal experience. In a modern world where symbols in art and poetry continue to help decipher meaning amid uncertainty, the poem offers guidance for a search for truth that remains central to the pursuit of both scholars and artists.
Gallery
