Massoud Hayoun is a 35-year-old painter from Los Angeles. His work lies at a far-out intersection of the personal and political and radically reimagines the lives of his dead North African grandparents, who raised him. He began to paint in August 2022. Mathqaf art organization has heralded him as an "artist crush du jour" and called his work "incredible," and he has already garnered solo and group shows across the United States through 2024, recently at Band of Vices in Los Angeles.
Hayoun is also an award-winning author and journalist. His first non-fiction book, a decolonial memoir of his grandparents and political theory of Arab identity entitled "When We Were Arabs,” won an Arab American Book Award for breaking new ground in Arab and Arab American studies and was a U.S. National Public Radio best book of the year. Ai Weiwei called his second book, a novel set in China, "exquisite." He has reported internationally for news outlets including Al Jazeera, CNN, and Agence France-Presse. Narrative truth-telling unifies his artistic, literary, and journalistic practices.