Born in Damascus in 1934 to immigrant Greek parents, Stelio Scamanga is a painter, architect and cultural critic. He contributed to numerous Lebanese publications during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1976, he left Lebanon for Switzerland and then France, holding exhibitions in New York, Zurich et Beirut – in art galleries like L’Amateur, at the Sursock Museum from the 1960s onward, and at the Baalbeck Festival in the 1970s. He has never stopped painting, campaigning for a form of abstraction without any psychological or narrative filters. His activities as an architect and art consultant earned him the job, between 1980 and 1995, of heading an important campaign aimed at placing some fifty works by Arab artists in prestigious public buildings in Saudi Arabia.