Lalla Assai-Essayd School of the Museum of Fine Arts Lalla Assai-Essayd was born in Morocco in 1956. At age sixteen, Assai-Essayd married a man from Saudi Arabia and moved to his country. She came to Boston six years ago to be with her son and daughter when they both were accepted by area colleges. Assai-Essayd was able to attend college, pursuing her life-long passion for art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her earliest memory of making art is sitting on the floor drawing with crayons as her father, an amateur painter, painted murals in their house in Morocco. She didn’t paint or draw for almost a decade after getting married and having responsibilities as a wife and mother. Besides, Saudi Arabia is not a country conducive to studying fine arts. There are no museums, few galleries, no teachers of fine arts, and no art schools. Painting, in fact, is considered only decorative. When she returned to making art, Assai-Essayd sought teachers to come to her home in Saudi Arabia. When traveling, she would take courses in painting and drawing. As soon as the artist had the chance, she came to Boston and matriculated as the Museum School/Tufts University. Assai-Essayd feels she is making up for lost time. She wants to find a way to have a voice in Saudi Arabia, a culture where women and artists alike are silenced. Women, like those decorative paintings, mostly serve in the role of commodities. This artist wants to be heard as an individual. For the public of Saudi Arabia, Assai-Essayd wants to spearhead a campaign to liberate art from its decorative status and make it more important in the culture. She wants to educate the public about fine arts and to create a community of artists who are free to express themselves in whatever medium they choose.