Born to a Kuwaiti father and Syrian mother, Shurooq Amin is a mixed-media interdisciplinary artist and an Anglophone poet whose purpose is to instigate change in society. She has a PhD in Ekphrasis, the connection between art and poetry, and has been published and anthologized internationally. She has been a guest speaker at various universities and a judge for various events. Shurooq has had 14 solo exhibitions, more than 45 group exhibitions, her paintings have been sold at auctions, commissioned privately and publicly, awarded prizes locally and internationally, and shown at biennales and art fairs. A retrospective of her work was featured in the biannual art journal Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East. Shurooq's poetry has been published into two books to date, in more than 40 literary journals across the globe, and has been anthologized in the Gathering the Tide.  She is the first Kuwaiti to be nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize in December 2007 in the USA.  In 2012 she was nominated as one of Kuwait's 46 Inspirational People in Sheikha Intisar Al-Sabah's book The Alchemy of Wisdom. Shurooq is the first Kuwaiti female artist to show her work at the Venice Biennale (56th International Venice Biennale, Italy; May to November 2015).