Nada Debs

Nada Debs is world-renowned for her collaborations with regional artisans, crafting furniture and objects that merge traditional techniques with a contemporary multicultural sensibility.

For her, craft is an ideal vehicle for uplifting communities, preserving ancient knowledge, and bringing people together across borders, timelines, and identities. It is an approach she calls “handmade and heartmade”, which draws on her own transcontinental experiences — from her upbringing in Japan and her training at the Rhode Island School of Design in the US, to her early career in the US and the UK.

Nada Debs has spent significant periods of her life living and traveling around the world, exploring the connections between different cultures. She currently divides her time between Dubai and Beirut, where her family originates and where she founded her studio twenty years ago. Committed to preserving the region’s artisanal heritage, she reinterprets traditional crafts through her distinctive perspective. Drawing inspiration from the places she has lived — Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom — she breathes new life into the craft traditions of the Levant and beyond. In September 2023, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris awarded her the Design Grand Prix d’Honneur.

Nada Debs’ work spans multiple scales and disciplines, from object and furniture design to bespoke commissions across the fields of design, art, fashion, jewellery, and interior architecture. With each project, she intuitively weaves culture and craftsmanship to create emotional resonance, embodying a human story and a sense of belonging. For her, creation goes beyond form and function; it is a celebration of connection – to places, to others, and to our own identity in the world.

The materials she chooses all tell a tactile story. For her, the human hand is a voice, and the artisan a storyteller. She describes craft as a practice that transmits memory, but also as a feeling that transcends geography, language, and culture. Her creative process weaves together ideas, gestures, and techniques gathered from her travels to form a unique cultural dialogue. “My work is driven by a belief in the power of craft to cross time and boundaries and to touch us on a primal level.”