[1] Since beginning her artistic career in the late 1950s, she has exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs throughout Europe, Asia, and North America.

He began the first taxi service in Jerusalem in the early 1900s, eventually becoming a principal of Lind & Halaby Ltd., a seller of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

[8] Halaby retains vivid visual memories of her life in Palestine, especially of the trees and leaves in her grandmother Maryam Atallah's garden in Jerusalem.

[11] The development of her work over the past fifty years has been closely related to locating the many principles of abstraction in nature utilizing a materialist approach.

[12] A number of her paintings have been created by building upon the methods and forms of certain historical applications of abstraction, such as that of the Russian Constructivists, and examples of traditional Arabic arts and Islamic architecture.

[13] The visual culture of Palestine and its natural setting have also figured into her paintings, as has the dynamism of New York City as experienced in the sights of people in motion and its busy streets [14] Her approach to abstraction has ranged from works exploring the visual properties of the geometric still life to free-form paintings in the form of collaged pieces of canvas that are joined to create larger abstractions that are free from the stretch.

[16] Creating programs that would allow viewers to witness the process of live computerized painting, she enlisted the help of musicians for kinetic art performances that were inspired by jam sessions.

[18] In terms of shape, the work depended essentially on the rectangular surfaces of human life, be they walls, windows, writing paper, floors, cards, or gently hung weavings.

This inspiration can be attributed to the painting Virgin and Child in Domestic Interior (c. 1467–69) by Flemish master Petrus Christus in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art in Kansas City.

[21] Halaby was then teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute and leading a boldly experimental program for first-year students.

[22] As she describes her interest in later writing, Halaby tells of revisiting the museum to examine how artists historically treated edges.

A book that showed how to cut flat shapes that could make complex three-dimensional pipe fittings led her to fascination in plotting helical and later cycloid curves.

The title had occurred to her while watching children play with arms outstretched while running, making engine sounds, pretending to be airplanes.

The result was that scale became relative and the space of the paintings could easily be read as variedly colored horizons such as one might see out of the window of an airplane.

Forty-five-degree diagonal lines emanate from the corners while points of diamonds began and ended at measured locations on the perimeter.

Her focus on the cells between veins in autumn leaves[28] and their similarity to city blocks that she knew in New York connected together formed basis for this series.

[29] Halaby noticed that human building was dominated by the right angle, but that in the growth of highways and city blocks those right-angled rectangles were often disturbed and thus truncated by the necessities imposed by natural land formations.

Her work became more apparent in freely moving gestures and her more generally more intuitive in execution while her ideas remained strongly structures.

Having been fascinated by computing since her days as a graduate student at Indiana University, Halaby began to focus on the relationship of art to the technology of its time.

Multi-percussion musician, Kevin Nathaniel Hylton became her main collaborator as she began the public performance process utilizing her program.

[32]Early in 1990, Halaby reviewed her entire practice and concluded that it was time to create space in the painting, relying only on brush marks as the building blocks of the work.

Allowing only the distribution of brush marks in different size and color to create the space without reference to imagery was both hard and generative.

Over a long and fertile career, Samia Halaby has always kept the picture plane and its perimeter in focus as a primary compositional player.

Beginning with her relationship with the Ayyam gallery, Halaby began to rely on her intuitions attempting to exploit the whole of her experience without demanding that growth be a known process or planned exploration.

In 2024, Halaby was scheduled for her first retrospective in the United States at Indiana University Bloomington’s Eskenazi Museum of Art, but the show was cancelled in December 2023.

In the early 2000s she was instrumental in the landmark exhibition "Made in Palestine," which was organized by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston and curated by James Harithas, Tex Kerschen, and Gabriel Delgado.

[43] The 2004 exhibition "The Subject of Palestine", which Halaby curated for the DePaul Art Museum, was described by the Chicago Tribune as presenting "the work of 16 contemporary Palestinian artists that even the least informed of viewers are likely to come away with the sense that they have seen and grasped something important."