Who's Bénédicte Moubarak - A Franco-Lebanese Artist

Who is Bénédicte de Vanssay Moubarak? Portrait of a Franco-Lebanese Artist

Artist, social entrepreneur, urban explorer, and founder of Beyt, Bénédicte has spent much of her life searching for beauty in places often overlooked. From abandoned houses and architectural fragments to forgotten objects and fading memories, her work is guided by a desire to preserve what time, conflict, and neglect threaten to erase.

Deeply shaped by her life between France and Lebanon, she has dedicated more than twenty years to documenting, restoring, and reimagining the stories embedded in broken and abandoned places. Today, that journey continues through watercolor and mixed-media paintings that capture the beauty of what remains.

Born in 1961, Bénédicte de Vanssay Moubarak is a Franco-Lebanese artist, designer, and social entrepreneur whose work has long explored the connections between heritage, memory, craftsmanship, and social impact.

Married to a Lebanese man, she has spent much of her life between France and the Middle East. After living in several countries, including Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and Cyprus, she settled in Lebanon in the early 2000s. There, she discovered a world that would profoundly shape both her artistic vision and her life’s work: the architectural heritage of Beirut and the Lebanese mountains—old houses, crumbling palaces, forgotten neighborhoods, and buildings carrying the traces of multiple histories and generations.

Moved by the rapid disappearance of this heritage through war, neglect, and real-estate speculation, she founded Beyt, an award-winning social enterprise dedicated to giving new life to abandoned architectural elements. Working with salvaged ironwork, wood, tiles, and fragments recovered from historic buildings in Lebanon and Syria, Beyt transformed what had been discarded into contemporary home objects shaped by memory and place.

At the heart of the project was a social mission. Through collaborations with local NGOs and artisan workshops, Beyt provided dignified work opportunities to people often excluded from the traditional job market, including individuals living with disabilities, women from marginalized backgrounds, refugees, and people experiencing homelessness.

For nearly two decades, Bénédicte and her husband Raja developed Beyt between Lebanon, Europe, and the United States, opening two stores, building international partnerships, and contributing to key initiatives in the field of social entrepreneurship. Throughout these years, she also documented the places that inspired her work through photography, sketchbooks, and watercolor.

2019, a turning point

The collapse of Lebanon’s economy in 2019, followed by the Beirut port explosion of August 4th, 2020, marked a turning point. As the country entered one of the most difficult periods in its modern history, countless historic homes were damaged, abandoned, or lost. In 2023, Beyt was forced to close its operations. You can watch the film made by the BBC that explains the Beyt project from 2005 to 2020.

Today, Bénédicte continues the same mission through watercolor and mixed-media painting. Drawing from years of urban exploration and photographic documentation, she paints abandoned houses, damaged interiors, and forgotten spaces across Lebanon. Her work seeks to preserve fragile traces of architectural memory and to reveal the beauty that persists within places marked by loss, time, and disappearance.

Though the medium has changed, the intention remains the same: to restore the unseen beauty of what has been broken and left behind.

An artist who paints abandoned houses

Bénédicte Moubarak's artistic practice is deeply connected to architecture and the lived experience of inhabitants. In the field, she explores neglected neighborhoods, particularly in Lebanon, photographing abandoned houses, half-open doors, stairs, and damaged windows. These images become the basis of her studio work.

In watercolor, she reconstructs facades and interiors. The transparency of the colors reveals the fragility of the places and the light that passes through them. She sometimes adds collages, dried flowers, or pieces of fabric from vintage textiles or aged papers, grounding each work in the tangible matter of everyday life.

Her aim is not nostalgia but the beauty behind destruction. Her watercolors are silent portraits of displaced families, suspended memories, and cities awaiting rebirth. Discover this universe in the collection dedicated to books and watercolors

An Artistic Practice of Memory and Preservation

Nourished by her dual culture, Bénédicte brings both the outside perspective of a Frenchwoman trained in European art history and the inner sensitivity of a woman deeply marked by two decades in Lebanon. She paints places that many avoid; she chooses to return to them, to observe, document, and then turn them into images that give a place to the invisible.

Through watercolor and mixed media, she transforms documentation into interpretation, combining observation with emotion, memory with imagination. 

The choice of materials is an essential part of this process. Watercolor allows her to capture atmosphere, light, and fragility, while collage introduces layers of memory, symbolism, and narrative.

Works and projects by Bénédicte Moubarak

Her watercolors and reproductions available on the Beyt website cover several themes: abandoned houses in Beirut, collages of building facades, imaginary arcades, doors marked by time, or streets after the explosion. Some works were chosen to be shown at the Art Capital fair at the Grand Palais, like The Green House.

The watercolor Roots will also be presented at the St Yrieix la Perche International Watercolor Festival.