Simone Fattal was born in Damascus, Syria in 1942 and grew up in Lebanon. She first studied philosophy at the École des Lettres of Beirut and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1969 she returned to Beirut and started painting. She participated in numerous shows during the ten years when life in Lebanon was still possible. In 1980, fleeing the civil war, she settled in California and founded the Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary work from an international roster of writers, including Etel Adnan, Marguerite Duras, Jalal Toufic, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, and Leslie Scalapino.
In 1988, Fattal returned to her artistic practice, enrolling at the Art Institute of San Francisco and crafting ceramic sculptures. Since 2006, she has produced works in Hans Spinner’s prestigious workshop in Grasse, France. In 2013, she released a movie, Autoportrait, which has been shown worldwide in many film festivals. In 2019, she was the subject of a career retrospective at MoMA PS1, titled Works and Days. In 2024, she won both the Berlin Grand Art Prize and Julio González International Prize. Other recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Musée du Louvre, Paris (2024-25); Secession, Vienna (2024); KINDL, Berlin (2023); Ocean Space, Venice (2023); and Portikus, Frankfurt (2023).