Hannah Rose Thomas

Hannah Rose Thomas (b. Italy, 1991) is an English artist and will be beginning her PhD at Glasgow University in September 2020 with UNESCO’s ‘Art Lab for Human Rights and Dialogue.’ While living in Jordan as an Arabic student in 2014, Hannah organised art projects with Syrian refugees for UNHCR. This experience led her to seek ways to combine her art and humanitarian work. Hannah subsequently began painting portraits of refugees she had met, to show the people behind the global crisis, whose personal stories are often shrouded by statistics.

Hannah’s portraits have been shown at the Houses of Parliament, European Parliament, Scottish Parliament, Lambeth Palace, The Saatchi Gallery and Durham Cathedral.  Three of Hannah’s paintings of Yezidi women were chosen by HRH The Prince of Wales for his exhibition Prince & Patron in Buckingham Palace in 2018. In August 2017 Hannah organised an art project in Northern Iraq with Yezidi women who had escaped ISIS captivity, and in April 2018 for Rohingya children in refugee camps on the Myanmar border. Her most recent project has been with survivors of Boko Haram and Fulani violence in Northern Nigeria.