Mona Saudi “ ˜An Artist' (1945-2022) Mona Saudi was a Jordanian sculptor, born in 1945 in Amman. As a young woman, Mona dreamt of traveling to Paris to study art. So, she left home in secret at the age of seventeen and spent a year in Beirut, (1962-1963) frequenting poets and artists in a city culturally alive with artistic innovation in the heydays of the early 1960s. She befriended modernist poets and writers in Beirut such as Yousef El Khal, Onis El Hajj, and Adonis, in addition to renowned Lebanese artists like Paul Guiragossian, Alfred Basbous and Michel Basbous. Sculptor Michel Basbous took her under his wing, teaching the young artist all he knew about form in art. Also, Artist Halim Jurdak opened the doors for Saudi to Beirut's burgeoning cultural scene. Throughout her life career, Saudi collaborated with Palestinian artists Vladimir Tamari and Kamal Boullata, and both became lifelong friends. Saudi's first exhibition took place in 1963 at the Caf de la Presse in Beirut on Hamra street. A few sales of her work were enough to buy her a ticket to sail to Paris where she joined the École Nationale Suprieure des Beaux-Arts. After Paris, Saudi left for Jordan in 1968, and in 1969 she returned to Lebanon. She lived between Lebanon and Jordan until she eventually settled in Lebanon in 1993 at the end of the Lebanese civil war. She kept moving between Beirut, Amman, and London where her daughter artist and designer Dia Batal lived. Saudi lived and worked in her remarkable house and workshop on Clemenceau street in Beirut; she passed away in 2022 at the age of Seventy-Seven.