Except for a rare self-portrait, Bibi Zogbé painted flowers—exuberant and confident, as well as modern and symbolic, her paintings reflect her life between her native Lebanon and three decades in Argentina.

Telling stories about life journeys may not be what most people think tap dancers do, but that is where Andrew Nemr taps his way into a deeper root of the art.

From North African deserts to Indo-Pacific archipelagos, creatures of the lands, seas and skies have been depicted in art, venerated in temples and hunted for more than 8,000 years. Now they are increasingly protected.

Working with civic reality as an architect and personal imagination as a novelist, Alaa Halifi has, at age 23, already won awards in both fields. His subject: his city, Casablanca.

Widely regarded as the most fragrant of roses, the Damascus rose bloomed first in Central Asia and came to the Levant and Anatolia via the Silk Roads. Today it is cultivated most intensively in Bulgaria’s Rose Valley, where it thrives as both export and heritage.

It was time for the family to sit down for dinner at Nawal Nasrallah’s home in Bloomington, Indiana. Nasrallah had made her 18-year-old daughter Iba’s favorite dish, Iraqi-style eggplant biryani, in honor of the college acceptance letter Iba had just received. Iba spooned the biryani onto her plate, took a bite and burst into tears. “Where am I going to find food like this at school?” she asked.

Palace cake was made in honor of the gods who were worshipped in the temples of Ur on the banks of the Euphrates. It contained raisins, aniseed, and an unbelievable amount of fat and dates.

As a young college student in the 1980s, George Steinmetz hitchhiked in the desert lands of north-central Algeria along the Sahara. In 2009 he revisited the region, now as a world-renowned photojournalist working on a book about the world’s extreme deserts and the human adaptations and settlements in them.

Cursive, vegetal, biomorphic forms predominate in patterns in Malaysia, Indonesia and parts of Thailand. This final installment in our series is based on the geometry of leaves and petals.