Her grandfather, Hajj Amin El-Husseini, was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Mandate era and an important figure in the resistance against British and Zionist colonial rule.
[4] In 1953, El-Husseini began attending classes for an undergraduate degree in political science at the Beirut College for Women (now known as the Lebanese American University).
Common motifs in her work are "...horses, which always find their way home; butterflies, which are never caged; and pomegranates, symbols of fertility and good luck.
[15] Significantly, El-Husseini often combined oil painting with embroidery which blurred the distinction between fine art practice and craft, which was often had a "lesser than" connotation.
[4] In 1982, when she was forced to relocate to Paris due to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War, she began to use Arabic calligraphy in her work as a way of representing "letters to my mother who is buried in Jerusalem.
"[4][20] In 1991 while living in Paris, she began to experiment with stained glass and studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.