Diana Quandour

Diana Quandour (who also goes by the alias Charlie Milliner) has been a self-taught figurative painter since 2011, selling her first work in an exhibition at the age of sixteen. She was born in Amman, the capital of Jordan, and moved to California in 2015 in hopes of pursuing her dreams to become a professional painter— as it would prove difficult to do so in the Middle East with limited options as a female artist.

Quandour prefers to work with the mediums of oil, watercolour, and ink. Her pieces are heavily inspired by the Fauvists (Matisse, Derain, van Dongen) and German Expressionists (Kirchner, von Jawlensky, Münter). With vibrancy of colour, she invokes mixed emotions in her audience, often with seemingly androgynous characters that carry with them a haunting presence from the past.

She had her first solo exhibition “The Hats of Past Lives” in San Diego at Fairouz Café and Gallery in May 2018 (owned by Palestinian artist Ibrahim al-Nashashibi) and hopes to exhibit once again as soon as the pandemic is over. Ultimately, Quandour would like to open an art school in her country so that she may offer young local creatives the opportunities and resources that she did not have herself growing up, assisting them in actualizing their dreams.