Dina Khorchid was a quiet child who liked to draw and paint, the youngest of four siblings in a Palestinian family living in Kuwait City during the Gulf War. In 1990, when she was 3, her father wrote a letter to a relative, saying, “Dina is growing up every day. Yesterday she made a picture of a pigeon.” 

Today, that letter is a cornerstone of Khorchid’s practice as an artist. Shortly after writing it, her father, a doctor who ran a medical clinic, was abducted and was never seen or heard from again. “We still don’t know the exact story of what happened, or why,” Khorchid says. She and her mother and siblings left Kuwait to live near family in Lebanon, then in the United Arab Emirates. The relative who received that long-ago letter returned it to the family, and Khorchid discovered it when she was in high school. Ever since, she says, “I feel like I’ve used art as a way to connect back to my father, and to deal with loss and memory, trauma, the chaos of not having answers. I think it comes naturally to want to make something tangible — to talk through something visual.” 

Images of the letter have appeared in Khorchid’s work on paper and fabric, in linocut prints layered with stitching and pastel strokes. The pigeon she drew as a small child resurfaced, too. “Pigeons are known to be excellent messengers,” she says. “To me, that means sending messages between past realities and present narratives of the mind.” And rather than migrate, Khorchid points out, pigeons tend to stay close to one location. “They identify it as home,” she says. “I love that, because I’m always searching for what is home.” 

Khorchid’s search brought her to the Rhode Island School of Design last fall, armed with a scholarship that covers all the costs of a two-year master’s program and provides mentorship, which I find really amazing,” Khorchid says. She graduated more than a decade ago from the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates with a degree in visual communication, and worked as a graphic designer for a magazine, a design studio, and an arts and culture nonprofit. Meanwhile, she established her own practice in printmaking and textiles through a Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF) in Abu Dhabi — which included a two-week visit to RISD — and another fellowship with the Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program in Beirut, Lebanon. 

It was in Beirut, in the summer of 2020, that Khorchid’s childhood experience with trauma and loss abruptly deepened. Thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate exploded at the city’s port, and the impact of the blast destroyed homes miles away. One of the walls of Khorchid’s apartment building shattered all over her bed just minutes after she had gotten up. Unhurt, she stumbled out of the building, where “it felt like a scene from a movie,” she says. “There was dust everywhere, people bleeding, running, broken glass on the streets.” 

Today, nearly two years later, Khorchid’s heart remains in Lebanon. She says she is “processing things from a distance,” immersing herself in new textile-making techniques with her professors at RISD while also staying true to the themes of loss, memory, healing, and home. “Because of my Palestinian background, knowing I cannot access my homeland, it brings up a feeling of being an outsider,” Khorchid says. “But we, as humans, are always in search of a place of comfort and connection.” 

This story was published in RISD’s Momentum Magazine in Spring 2022. Photo by Jo Sittenfeld.