Yusef Hourani was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1999. After completing his secondary education, Yusef quickly sought to pursue a career in art which led him to the city of Florence, Italy where he formally studied the classical method of academic drawing and painting at the Florence Academy of Art under the direction of Daniel Graves. It was there in Florence that he also studied the practice of Christian Iconography under the private tutoring of Sister Giselle Cappuccini, a nun from the Fraternités de Jérusalem based in the Badia Fiorentina Church in the historical center of the city. 

Yusef also draws from the rich tradition of Islamic art both sacred and secular which fuels his interest in calligraphy, decorative arts and geometry. Between his studies of European art in Florence and personal investigation into the art of the Islamic world, Yusef explores the many convergences and differences between these two traditions to form a new synthesis of visual language, one which balances between seemingly polar opposites; realism and abstraction, the literal and the symbolic, the physical and the metaphysical.