About the artist

Hannah Rose Thomas is a British artist and human rights advocate. Hannah has just completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow, a scholarship with UNESCO. She has a BA was in Arabic and History from Durham and MA from the King’s Foundation School of Traditional Art in London, where she specialised in early Renaissance and iconography painting techniques.

While living in Jordan as an Arabic student in 2014, Hannah organised art projects with Syrian refugees for UNHCR. This experience led her to seek ways to combine her art and humanitarian work. Hannah subsequently began painting portraits of refugees she had met, to show the people behind the global crisis, whose personal stories are often shrouded by statistics. 

Hannah has organised art projects in Iraqi Kurdistan with Yazidi women who had escaped ISIS captivity; Rohingya refugees in Bangladeshi camps; and survivors of Boko Haram and Fulani sexual violence in Northern Nigeria. Her most recent project has been in Romania with Ukrainian refugee children.

Through her art Hannah gives voice to the voiceless, lionises the isolated and prescribes dignity to the persecuted and forcibly displaced. Hannah seeks to use art as a tool for advocacy, bringing their stories into places of influence in the Global North.

Hannah's portraits have been shown at places including the International Peace Institute in New York, UK Houses of Parliament, European Parliament, Scottish Parliament, Lambeth Palace, The Saatchi Gallery, Southwark Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.  Three of Hannah’s paintings of Yazidi women were chosen by HM King Charles III for his exhibition Prince & Patron in Buckingham Palace in 2018.

Hannah’s exhibition Tears of Gold is part of an online exhibition for the UN with Google Arts & Culture 'The Future is Unwritten: Artists for Tomorrow' to mark the UN’s 75th Anniversary. Her debut art book Tears of Gold: Portraits of Yazidi, Rohingya and Nigerian Women was published in February 2024.

Hannah was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 2019 in recognition of her work using art as a tool for advocacy, and British Vogue Future Visionaries 2022. She was shortlisted for the Women of the Future Award 2020, the World Humanitarian Forum Youth Changemaker Award 2020 and nominated for the UN Women UK Awards 2020.