Sunny Rahbar

Co-founder, The Third Line (Dubai)

Sunny Rahbar is of Iranian origin and was raised in Dubai, UAE. Rahbar graduated with a Bachelor of the Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York in 2000. During school and after graduation, she worked at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, before moving to London where she worked at Sotheby’s on contemporary decorative art sales. She moved back to New York in 2001 where she was involved with the launch of eyestorm.com’s New York gallery space.

At the end of 2001, Rahbar returned to Dubai and worked independently with young and emerging artists. She was involved with numerous private and public art projects with a determined goal to foster a platform for the promotion of a rising generation of artists in the region. In 2003, she took up the position of resident curator at Five Green, known as the first creative lifestyle showroom in the United Arab Emirates, and curated several exhibitions.

Rahbar decided to move one step further and provide a concrete foundation to the ideology that she had worked towards. In 2005, with her two partners Claudia Cellini and HE Omar Gobash, she co-founded The Third Line in Dubai – a contemporary art gallery focused on building an internationally recognized platform for artists relevant to the Middle East region. Rahbar and her partners also expanded into non-commercial endeavors and art advisory programming as well as publications, having produced several artist books to date.