Born into an academic family in Beirut in 1948, Afaf Zurayk and her three sisters came in touch with art at an early age. Her parents recognise her talent early on and send her to an art school at the age of ten. Her father is Constantin Kaysar Zurayk, a well-known intellectual, acting president of the American University of Beirut (AUB) and a leading figure of the Arab Nationalist Movement. By the age of fifteen, A. Zurayk receives private lessons from the renowned Lebanese artist Helen Khal (1923-2009), who significantly influences her artistic style.
A. Zurayk began her training as an artist in the late 1960s, first at the AUB, then at Harvard. She graduated in 1972 and returned to Beirut. She was travelling to Washington, DC in 1975 when civil war broke out in her homeland. She returned to Beirut shortly after, terribly shocked by the war, but Washington would eventually become a second home for her. In 1976 she decided to focus solely on her artistic practice and gave lectures at the Lebanese American University. In 1983, A. Zurayk emigrates to Washington. By that time she had developed her own style, layering oil paint of similar nuances mixed with a dry brush, as seen for example in her series Beirut Octet (2022).

Her works are ambiguous, as they are peaceful and unsettling at the same time. She uses soft, velvety colours that nevertheless seem harsh, and her controlled brushwork appears wild and chaotic, as in Untitled (2004) or in Shifting Lights (2017). Central to her body of work is also her immense oeuvre of poetry, which cannot be separated from her artistic practice. With few words and energetic language, she reaches out to explore the deepest feelings of human beings, their inner lives, and what connects them to each other. A. Zurayk has written eight books, all of them a combination of art and poetry. In My Father. Reflections (2010), she investigates her complex relationship with her famous father. Beyond Art (2020), created during the Covid lockdown in Washington deals with the desensitising of human needs she perceived in society at that time. Her latest work, The View from Within (2021), describes her artistic journey to her inner self.

A. Zurayk has exhibited worldwide, but especially in the Middle East, where she is very important for a younger generation of women artists. Significant works are in the collections of the Sursock Museum, the Barjeel Art Foundation, Darat al-Funun, as well as the British Museum. In 2017 she won the prestigious Jouhayna Baddoura Prize for Art. After the death of her parents in 2006, Afaf Zurayk returned to Beirut, where she continues her work as an artist.