Karina El Helou

Karina El Helou is the director of the Sursock Museum, a modern and contemporary art museum in Beirut. Since October 2022, she has been leading the restructuring of the Museum following the blast and overseeing its financial recovery after the economic collapse in Lebanon in 2019. She has worked on establishing international partnerships to strengthen the museum’s educational mission around its collection, she curated as well several exhibitions at the museum.

Prior to her role at the Sursock Museum, Karina served as a collection manager for the President of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris and as a tutor at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London. In 2015, she founded the non-profit curatorial platform Studiocur/art. Some of the platform’s major projects include The Silent Echo exhibition at the Baalbek Museum ( Lebanon) under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and Cycles of Collapsing Progress exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA) at the Rashid Karami International Fair and the citadel of Tripoli (Lebanon).

Karina holds a master’s degree in History of Art from Sorbonne University in Paris.