Passionate about art since her childhood, Odile Mazloum started taking drawing and painting classes while still at school, with Georges Corm at the Cercle de la Jeunesse Catholique in Beirut in the late 1950s. She then enrolled first at the American University of Beirut (AUB) before starting her degree at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) in 1961, where she studied under Yvette Achkar (1928–2024), Paul Guiragossian (1926–1993), Nadia Saikali (1936–) and Rafic Charaf (1932–2003), amongst others. She returned to AUB in the following year (1962–63), and also frequented the studios of both Georges Cyr (1881–1964) and Guvder (1923–2016). In 1964 she left for Paris, where she spent a year at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the École du Louvre. This dynamism and curiosity to learn are characteristic of O. Mazloum. Her ambition from youth was to be both an artist and a gallerist, collecting artworks even as a child. Upon her return from Paris she opened her first gallery, Galerie L’Amateur, in Beirut’s Hamra district.

Mazloum’s career as an artist and gallerist developed in parallel. A regular from 1962 onwards at the salons of the Lebanese Ministry of National Education and Fine Arts and the Sursock Museum, as well as the Alexandria Biennale, she held her first solo exhibition at Beirut’s Carlton Hotel in 1963. In the same year she became a member of the Lebanese Artists Association of Painters and Sculptors. In 1964, her second solo exhibition followed at Hotel Saint-Georges. After opening L’Amateur, she exhibited there in 1968, 1971 and 1974, between solo exhibitions for artists such as P. Guiragossian, Cici Sursock (1923–2015), Vahé Barsoumian (1943–), Olga Limansky (1903–1988) and Farid Aouad (1924–1982), about whose work she was especially passionate. Following the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), she was forced to close L’Amateur in around 1977. She continued painting and exhibiting, however, and reopened a gallery in Kaslik, north of Beirut, in 1987. She called the new gallery Alwane (‘colours’ in Arabic).

Colours are central to O. Mazloum’s work as an artist: she “makes colour sing”, as one critic wrote of her 1968 exhibition. Her main motifs are people and landscapes, which she paints from memory using her imagination. Between abstraction and figuration, her works are full of energy and reflect her impulsive nature. Her work is often described as being genuine. Flowers is exemplary of her use of colour and composition. In Refugees we can see the range of expressions in O. Mazloum’s faces, depicting women and children who had fled their homes during the civil war.

Her works can be found in public and private collections, mainly in Lebanon, including the Beirut Museum of Art and the Dalloul Art Foundation, as well as the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. O. Mazloum has also taught painting, both to amateurs (adults and children) and at ALBA.