Born in Gaza in 1971, El-Maqousi is a visual artist and freelance photographer. In 1995, he attended the Summer Art Academy at Darat Al-Funoon in Amman, where he was supervised by the internationally renowned artist Marwan Kassab Bachi. Nominated by the A.M. Qattan Foundation, he received the Charles Asprey Award for Palestinian artists in 2003, along with an art residency in Bangalore, India. He was also awarded third place for Best Photograph by the Union of Arab Photographers in Germany and received a special award at the Nile Culture Biennale in Cairo in 2009. In 2013, after a nomination by UNESCO, he participated in a residency in Algeria, and in 2016, he took part in an art residency in Connecticut, USA.

El-Maqousi has held ten solo exhibitions and has participated in numerous group exhibitions both locally and internationally. He works as an art teacher and is a founding member of the collective Shababeek for Contemporary Art ↗.

The life of displacement, moving from one place to another in search of a safe station to his family, has not diminished his positive spirit or his humanity, which he insists on protecting from the brutality and harshness of war. This is evident whether he is working with children, helping them express their fears, war nightmare and dreams, and providing them with moments during the war where they feel alive and experience childhood, even if just for a short time, or through his continuous work on producing drawings and paintings that capture his emotions, thereby creating his own space and time, even if it's in a corner of a tent crowded with his children in a packed displacement camp.