Jack Persekian
Palestinian artist and curator
Jack Persekian (born 1962) is a Palestinian artist and curator from Jerusalem. He is of Armenian descent and a United States citizen.
Biography
Born to an Armenian family in East Jerusalem, Persekian started his career in the arts world as a musician and music promoter in the 1980s, before turning to the visual arts. After returning from an extended stay in the United States in 1992, he founded Anadiel Gallery in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, as the first independent gallery in the Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation, with a focus on contemporary Palestinian artists. In 1996, he invited Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum to Jerusalem and subsequently organized her first exhibition in Palestine. Persekian is also the founder and director of Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem.
With Al-Ma’mal, he curated the 2008 and 2010 editions of The Jerusalem Show, which has since established itself as a biennial cultural event in the Old City. In 2008, he was jury president of the biennial Artes Mundi art competition at the National Museum Cardiff, the biggest art prize in the United Kingdom.
From 2009 to 2011, he served as the founding director of the Sharjah Art Foundation with responsibility for the Sharjah Biennial. He lost his position over a controversial artwork that was banned from the art show following an intervention by Sharjah's ruler, Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20716755. VIAF identifies the subject as 4229149198258074940009. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1992, 1996 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jack Persekian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.