 Hassan was born in Cairo in 1957 as the second son to a Nubian family.His father Hassan was Sudanese and his mother Fatma was from Toshka in southern Egypt.He studied art as a teenager at Cairo's Kerabia Middle School where he was taught by the sculptor Ghaleb Khater.,

In 1976, Hassan worked for some months in a library Madbuli in Cairo.The Ministry offered him a job and he moved to Baghdad in 1977.