Born in 1971, Shefa-Amer. Lives in Jerusalem.

In her drawings, installations, video works and performances, Jumana Emil Abboud embraces a metaphorical approach based on material experiences of the body whilst addressing issues such as femininity, memory, identity and the political situation in Palestine.
The video Pomegranate (2005) shows a woman's hands meticulously placing the seeds of the pomegranate back into its shell. This laborious and seemingly senseless performance is an obsessive gesture that tries to annul the results of violent displacements.
In Smuggling Lemons (2006) the artist repetitively records the social reality and exhausting procedure of crossing the checkpoints between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Making several journeys through the checkpoints, she smuggles the fruit of an entire lemon tree from its garden in Jerusalem. By presenting the landscape and the monotony of the journey, the video records the way that repression works, and the lemons that the artist carries in her arms and on her body take on different connotations.
In her installation Sainthood and the Sanity-hood (1999-2009) the artist takes the iconography of female saints as a starting point for developing her own 'hieroglyphic' visual language. The series explores the female body as a metaphor to reflect different personal experiences and social phenomena, and questions the notions of sanctity and sacrifice in terms of the gap between women's individuality and expected social roles.