📣 For more lifestyle news, click here to join our WhatsApp Channel and also follow us on Instagram
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
By Sadiba Hasan
Rama Duwaji is having a busy fall.
There she was in the front row at the runway show for Diotima during New York Fashion Week, sitting near Instagram executive Eva Chen, fashion designer Willy Chavarria, and model and activist Bethann Hardison.
Duwaji had illustrations published in a feature article in New York magazine about the objects that Palestinians took with them when they fled their homes in the Gaza Strip.
Over Labor Day weekend, as a singer crooned in Farsi and an oud player strummed gently, she sat on a bench in the backyard of a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a fundraiser for mutual aid groups in Sudan. Some of her prints were for sale on a table inside the bar. One, in black and white, showed two women, standing defiantly, with their arms interlocked and their backs pressed against each other.
What Duwaji, 28, has not been doing this summer and fall, is stumping for her husband.
That husband was a little-known state Assembly member whom Duwaji matched with on Hinge in 2021 — when she was living the kind of young artist’s life, as a freelance animator and illustrator, that she envisioned when she moved to New York after college. He is now very well known: Zohran Mamdani.
And Duwaji is getting used to what her brand-new husband’s campaign for mayor in a highly publicized race means for her, and their life together.
In June, after Mamdani stunned Andrew Cuomo by beating him in the Democratic primary, Duwaji was onstage beside her husband during his victory speech, smiling in a boatneck dress and a “Zohran NYC” pin. In the days after his victory, Duwaji gained more than 100,000 new followers on Instagram, many of whom commented that they were intrigued by her “cool” style and artistic endeavors.
“She’s our modern-day Princess Diana,” said Hasnain Bhatti, 32, a photographer and a friend.
She has declined all press requests since the primary — including one for an interview for this article, explaining that the attention is new to her — as her husband pushes toward the general election. Mamdani’s campaign declined to comment on her decision not to participate in public election-related events or on what her role might be should Mamdani win.
Several of her close friends describe this moment for her as exciting but overwhelming, and very far from what she imagined she might be caught up in when she moved to New York City in 2021.
Duwaji does speak publicly on her own online platforms. In August, after Israeli strikes killed Anas al-Sharif, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in Gaza who was 28, she posted an animation on Instagram of a metal chain encircling a quotation: “I urge you to not let chains silence you or borders hold you back,” flashing to a Palestinian flag with the words “end the genocide.”
“I believe everyone has a responsibility to speak out against injustice, and art has such an ability to spread it,” Duwaji said in an interview in April with Yung, a magazine based in the Middle East and Africa. Many of her designs express concern for humanitarian crises in Gaza, Sudan and Lebanon, and portray intimate scenes of Middle Eastern life.
But so far, she has not participated in the kind of campaign activities that the spouses of candidates often do, keeping herself out of the traditional political spotlight during her husband’s sudden ascent. She attends art events and leads ceramics workshops around the city. Of the many questions she may have to answer if Mamdani prevails next month, the biggest one could be: Can she keep that up?
Chirlane McCray, the most recent first lady of New York City, had been married to Bill de Blasio for two decades when he was first elected mayor. McCray, who is also an artist, served as the city’s first lady for eight years. (She and de Blasio announced their separation in 2023.)
She has not met Duwaji, but she said that while there were expectations and obligations that came with the role, “times have changed.”
“I think that there’s more acceptance now that a spouse can define their level of visibility,” McCray said.
Growing up, Duwaji frequently got in trouble in class for doodling in textbooks and notebooks. Born in Houston, Duwaji, who is of Syrian descent, moved to Dubai when she was about 9. Drawing, she has told interviewers over the years, was her solace.
“Time goes by really quickly when I draw,” she said in a podcast interview in 2020.
Her father, a software developer, and her mother, a doctor, were supportive of her love of art, though they also encouraged her to be practical when it came to choosing a career. During her last few months in high school in Dubai, she decided to pursue art as a career.
She chose to attend Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar for her freshman year of college. Duwaji moved to Richmond, Virginia, the main VCU campus, to complete her undergraduate studies.
There, she realized the ways in which, as a Syrian, she didn’t “fit in as well,” she said on a podcast in 2019. “I started making work about identity, what it means to be Syrian abroad and kind of just delved into these topics that meant a lot to me,” she said.
She graduated in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in communication arts. After that, she lived with her family in Dubai and participated in various artist residencies, including in Beirut and Paris.
When she moved to New York in 2021 to pursue a career as an artist, she soon developed a relationship with Mamdani, whose friends have shared that he was “so giddy” about her and that Duwaji naturally fit into their group. Several friends of his confessed to liking her more than they liked Mamdani.
Once a Brooklyn resident, she and Mamdani now live in Astoria, Queens, near Steinway Street, a hot spot for Arab cuisine and culture where hookah shops and restaurants line the block.
In conversations with half a dozen people who know Duwaji from the close-knit worlds of Muslim American artists and creators in New York, her friends painted a picture of a relatively new New Yorker who still always manages to know what gallery exhibits in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to go to or where to get the best shawarma.
‘Her Own Line’
In a work of animation, a pair of hands massages kale, chops pecans and peels a carrot. It is narrated by a woman reminiscing about growing up in Egypt and observing how expressive the women in her family were with their hands when they cooked.
It’s part of a mixed-media project called “Sahtain!” — an Arabic expression similar to “bon appétit” — which was Duwaji’s master’s thesis, about the communal act of making and sharing a dish.
In 2024, Duwaji graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a master of fine arts in illustration as visual essay. Riccardo Vecchio, the chair of Duwaji’s master’s program who also taught her in Painting II, remembered his former student as “very focused on her work.”
On Oct. 21, 2024, Mamdani posted a photo of Duwaji, smiling, on Instagram, with the caption “Light of my life,” a ring emoji and the hashtag #hardlaunch. Two days later, he began his mayoral campaign.
His new fiancee was largely able to continue to make art in privacy during the early days of the campaign, but in the spring, some critics raised questions about whether he was “hiding” her.
In response, Mamdani posted more photos of Duwaji on Instagram, this time showing their courthouse wedding, including the pair on the subway, with Duwaji in white with a vintage coat, holding flowers, and both at City Hall.
He shared that he and Duwaji had married in February, three months before, and she was thrust into the public eye. In July, the couple held a wedding celebration in Uganda, where Mamdani was born. Some friends from New York made the trip to join the festivities. The one stipulation — no phones.
In August, while her husband continued to rack up small campaign donations, Duwaji was in the Catskill Mountains, hosting a tile workshop that invited participants to paint a set of four ceramic tiles inspired by native Syrian flora.
At the retreat, Duwaji introduced herself to Rowan Spencer, who wore a shirt depicting Irish and Palestinian solidarity. They spoke about their Irish and Syrian roots — Spencer’s family is from Cork, Ireland, and Duwaji encouraged him to take pride in his heritage — and their “experiences growing up between the States and these homelands which have been torn up by war and conflict,” he said.
“She makes you feel really comfortable,” said Spencer, a founder of a pop-up restaurant called Mon Petit Canard that provided the music and food for the retreat.
If her husband wins in November, Duwaji would hold a position that has been sparsely filled in the past five decades.
“We don’t really have a history of first ladies in modern-day New York,” Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. Michael Bloomberg and Edward Koch, who both served for 12 years, were unmarried, as is Eric Adams.
If Duwaji finds herself as the city’s first lady, just four years after moving to New York as an aspiring artist, McCray believes she has an advantage.
“Fortunately, her youth will give her more energy,” McCray said. “Which is helpful because it is the city that never sleeps.”
