Omar Sha3: The Artist Behind Unforgettable Faces, Fashion & Flags

Multidisciplinary Palestinian artist Omar Sha3 calls from Jordan, the country where he was raised. The Levantine landscape, home to a varied typography of rolling green hills and supernatural deserts, has long been the inspiration for his photoseries, paintings, and sculptures. Sha3 frequents the city, too, bopping from Amman to Dubai as a fashion photographer, taking his unique vision with him across borders and mediums.

"There was no intention to do fashion photography. I was just taking pictures," he says humbly. Behind him, a portfolio spans the likes of Burberry, Hugo Boss and Yves Saint Laurent, which he built in less than a decade. The models for his shoots might be the more impressive collection of names—he seems to have taken pictures of every young Arab artist and activist we follow online. He has taken shots of rappers like Daboor from Palestinian label BLTNM, Egypt’s Ziad Zaza, Palestinian singer Zeyne, and even Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad.

His Instagram feed reads as a travel diary across the Arab world, but also a high-saturation, high-contrast, borderline-psychedelic dream journal. One will notice pops of blue in his feed—one of Sha3’s latest creative ventures experimenting with the emotions the colour sparks from its lightest to darkest shade. His artwork melts into activism. Recently, he has been exploring how to represent flags in his paintings, beginning with those of Palestine and Lebanon.

“There was so much happening politically, and [these paintings] became a way to express it, to document what was happening through art,” Sha3 says. "When someone makes a war poster, it's either about tragedy or hope, and I was trying to make mine more hopeful. The folds, the fabrics, brought out that feeling of hope."

In his painting of the Lebanese flag, posted during the most recent war in 2026, the flag flies through the air like a bird against a blue sky. His Palestinian flag series is a couple of years older, posted in the weeks following October 7th. In each painting, the flag is folded much like the Lebanese flag he would paint years later, revealed in motion: one is carried through the air by doves, another surrounded by angels rising from the corpses below as a doctor gives a speech - a scene based on the press conference surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah gave in front of Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, standing amongst the victims of an Israeli attack.

The flag series Sha3 is working on now is not related to any one country. They are devoid of the nationalism one might expect. Instead, these flags are an exercise in abstraction and a return to more playful, childlike impulses.

“I'm trying to focus purely on the language of the folds, away from anything political or any clear meaning,” Sha3 says. “No country, nothing, just a huge ribbon and folds, and seeing what this thing can make me feel.”

Sha3’s next chapter builds on his multimedia career. He is working on a book and plans to establish a production company with his brother, called ‘Krema’. “The main purpose of [the company] is to make commercial work that resembles the kind of thing our parents used to watch back in the day,” Sha3 says, “so that the work we make feels really relatable.”

From Amman to Dubai, from fashion to flags, Sha3 keeps folding one medium into the next, and finding something hopeful in the creases.