mama ganuush

“Mama Ganuush” (ماما غنوج): My artist name references one of a my favorite Palestinian appetizer “Baba Ghanough”. Crushing an egg plant (aka “the patriarchy”) is a key step to make the famous appetizer. Also Ghanough in Palestinian dialect refers to a sassy and feminine attitude. Thus, Mama Ganuush is a playful fatale being sassing up the patriarchy with their queer magic.

I am a disabled, trans Palestinian artist, and community organizer. Born to a father displaced from Yafa during the Nakbaand a mother from Gaza displaced during the Naksa, my work is inseparable from the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the broader fight against settler-colonialism, empire, and apartheid.

I am a survivor of conversion therapy, forced displacement, and live with longterm disability. These experiences ground my advocacy for queer, disabled, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian self-determination. I reject the co-optation of queer identity by imperial and pinkwashing agendas. Queer liberation is impossible without a free Palestine.

I founded the Heritage Activists and Liberation Artists (HALA) Collective, a platform for anti-colonial artists centering Palestinian, Indigenous, and Global South voices. I also founded the JAHA Film Festival, an international showcase for trans, intersex, and gender variant filmmakers from Indigenous communities and the Global South, and the JAHA Trans Liberation Film School, a free educational resource developed with scholars Eric A. Stanley and dee(dee) c. ardan.

My performance practice blends Egyptian golden-era belly dance, Palestinian folk traditions, and improvisational theater into a Palestinian queer futurism, imagining what Palestinian art would have become had colonization never interrupted it. My 2025 short documentary A Message with the partnership of my dear friend Nasri Sayegh premiered at JAHA Film Festival in Lisbon, a surrealist exploration of diaspora identity and inherited trauma.

As an organizer, I joined federal litigation challenging U.S. complicity in genocide, led hunger strikes in solidarity with Gaza, protested Pinkwashing at New York Fashion Week, and mobilized alongside AROC, Jewish Voice for Peace, GayShame, Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, International Jewish Anti-zionist Network, Palestinian Youth Movement, Qravo Colectivo, and other anti-colonial community organizations. In 2025 they joined over 60 Portuguese LGBTI+ collectives opposing EuroPride's normalization of Israeli state violence.

Through every medium and action, I work on presenting Palestinians not as subjects of tragedy but as architects of freedom. I insist on a world where trans and queer people of the Global South and Indigenous communities are seen, resourced, and free.