MA, Islamic Art & Architecture, American University in Cairo, Egypt (2009) Prince Claus Award 2016 TED Senior Fellow 2016 Bahia Shehab (Arabic: بهية شهاب; born 1977)[1] is a Lebanese Egyptian multidisciplinary artist, designer, historian, creative director, educator and activist based in Cairo.

By imbuing traditional Arabic and Islamic scripts with political messages, she has used art to explore and interrogate to understand societal situations and bring them to a larger audience.

She sought out one thousand different designs of Arabic no's, finding them on buildings, mosques, plates, textiles, pottery and books, and from countries including Spain, China, Afghanistan and Iran - all places where Islam had thrived at one point in history or another.

Next to this installation was a book, which was published by the Khatt Foundation, where she gathered all one thousand no's into chronological order, together with the names of the places where she came by them, the media that were originally used to write them and the patrons who were responsible for commissioning the works upon which the no's were found.

In this project, Shehab was concerned with how the Arab cultural heritage was being physically destroyed on one hand and, on the other, how it was being intellectually attacked by Western nations and labelled as backwards and terroristic.

[13] Other quotes include, "No to the impossible", "We love life if we had access to it", "I will dream", "How big is the idea, how small is the state", "Those who have no land have no sea", "On this earth there are things worth living for", "One day we will be who we want to be, the journey has not started and the road has not ended", and "My people will return as air and light and water".

Thus far, she has painted walls in Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Lebanon, the United States of America, Morocco and Norway.

The exhibition used plexiglass screens, video and audio projections and flower scents, allowing the audience to enjoy a multi-sensory experience.

A book, whose narrative begins with Lebanon's Civil War in the 1980s and ends in 2017 after the revolution in Egypt, also contains a documentation of 77 flowers along with their significance to the artist.

[19][12] In 2018, Bahia completed an artist residency at the Shangri La Museum for Islamic Art, Design & Culture in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Based on a poem from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the stanza - depicted in an artist-created font of foliated and pixellated Kufic script, with roots instead of vegetation - is a site-specific commentary on colonized land.