Laila Shawa was born in Gaza in 1940, eight years prior to the Palestinian Nakba. She attended boarding school in Cairo, at the Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute in Cairo before moving to Rome in 1958 where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. She stayed in Europe until 1965, when she completed her education and moved back to Gaza, where she directed arts and crafts classes in refugee camps across the region and spent a year teaching an art class for a UNESCO education program. Two years later, she moved to Beirut, Lebanon where she worked as a full time painter for nine years. Upon the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war, she returned to Gaza and founded the Rashad Shawa Cultural Centre, a cultural center intended to provide cultural connections to Gaza through art shows and exhibitions. Shawa continued to paint and hold exhibitions within three Middle East before holding her first show in London in 1992, the same year she painted her famous photo Hands of Fatima, which depicts the struggle of being a Palestinian Muslim woman living in an occupied state. Her work gained international acclaim in 1994 after an show titled Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World, which she collaborated on with Mona Hatoum and Balqees Fakhro. One of her most famous works of Laila’s art is Walls of Gaza III, Fashionista Terroista, a screen printing of her photographs showing a scarf and a sweater decorated with Swarovski crystal, meant to visualize how the people of the west use the Arab struggle as a fashion statement.