Christiana Jabara is an independent curator whose practice explores the intersections of material culture, cultural memory, and the artistic practices of women from the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region. Rooted in a belief that exhibitions can function as living archives, her work seeks to create spaces where overlooked histories are not only recovered but continually reimagined through dialogue between artists, objects, and audiences.

Her curatorial direction was shaped during her MA studies in Contemporary Art at Sothebys where she became increasingly aware of the structural inequalities that have historically marginalised women artists within art historical discourse. While these disparities persist globally, they remain especially visible across much of the SWANA region, where women’s contributions have often been excluded from institutional narratives and collecting histories.

For Christiana, curating is an act of cultural stewardship. She sees artists, collectors, patrons, and institutions as interconnected participants in the construction of cultural memory, each playing a vital role in preserving practices that might otherwise remain unseen. Collecting, exhibiting, and commissioning become acts of care—ensuring that the voices of women artists enter an evolving historical record that can inform future generations.

At the centre of her practice is the conviction that artworks are active vessels of memory. Their material presence carries stories that extend beyond aesthetics, embodying histories of place, labour, ritual, and identity. Drawn to works that communicate through both form and substance, Christiana brings artists into conversation across disciplines and generations, allowing exhibitions to unfold as layered ecosystems of shared meaning. Each exhibition becomes a living archive—one that remains open, accumulative, and continually reinterpreted over time.

She regards artists and designers as contemporary alchemists, transforming memory into material form. Through painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, and design, they translate inherited knowledge into works that speak across time and place. Her exhibitions seek to honour this transformative capacity, creating encounters where material culture becomes a bridge between past and present, individual and collective memory, and local histories and global conversations.

Naturally drawn to the visual arts from a young age, Lara Jabara advanced her passion, study and talent in art, photography and aesthetics with storytelling through her degree in creative direction in fashion and curation before envisaging and launching FAME. Joining the dots between photography, fashion, and design, as creative director she leads FAME’s entire creative vision across its digital presence and film culture and oversees the creative strategies and beliefs that communicate the platform’s signature style and identity.

Lara uses her personal lens in her role also as artistic director on shoots to cast the female designers she respects and admires in new lights, reflecting on their individual and collective works through the unique frame of FAME. Overseeing, taking part herself on set and working closely with creative collaborators that range from photographers, film directors and videographers, to models, musicians, graphic designers and events production teams, her gift for directing, editing, photographing and crafting striking imagery ensures her curatorial messaging and vision embedded throughout FAME is conveyed accurately by her teams.

Driven by FAME’s core mission to reconsider the fundamental role and evolving identity of women in Middle Eastern arts and creativity, a continuation of Lara’s own narrative, as well as the culture of the region, her inspired imagination, multifaceted abilities and strategic foresight serve as an anchor for all visual communication elements of the platform and curation of its projects.