About

hello.Rania Hassan is a designer, painter, and illustrator, and grew up traveling around the world with notebooks in her pockets. As a mixed media fiber artist, she combines knitting and painting in her work. Her installations are about community, home, and how knitting connects us to others and to generations past. In 2009, she received a Craft Award of Excellence from the James Renwick Alliance, the organization which supports the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2010-2011, she worked with a team at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to document, create, curate, assemble, and install an exhibit in the museum’s Sant Ocean Hall titled ‘The Smithsonian Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef.’ She recently installed a commissioned piece in the permanent collection at the National Institutes of Health [NIH] in Bethesda, MD. Since studying graphic design at the American University of Beirut, she has worked as an art director for Leo Burnett, the United Nations, The Shakespeare Theatre, and The White House. Rania now calls Washington, DC, home and has settled in a sunny neighborhood called Bloomingdale with her husband and fellow artist Sean Hennessey.

In 2006 she launched her own handmade line of illustrated products and artwork which she sells worldwide. Her illustrations and artwork have appeared in publications such as HOW Magazine, Venus Zine, and web sites such as Daily Candy. She spends all of her time working on new illustrations which she screenprints onto notebooks. And when she’s not doing that, she’s either knitting, or painting, or combining the two in her artwork.