Mama Ganuush is a disabled, trans Palestinian performance artist, writer, filmmaker, and community organizer. Born to a father displaced from Yafa during the Nakba and a mother from Gaza displaced during the Naksa, their work is inseparable from the struggle for Palestinian liberation and the broader fight against settler-colonialism, empire, and apartheid.

They are a survivor of conversion therapy, forced displacement, and live with multiple sclerosis. These experiences ground their unapologetic advocacy for queer, disabled, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian self-determination. Mama Ganuush rejects the co-optation of queer identity by imperial and pinkwashing agendas, insisting instead that queer liberation is impossible without a free Palestine.

Mama Ganuush founded the Heritage Activists and Liberation Artists (HALA) Collective, a platform for anti-colonial artists centering Palestinian, Indigenous, and Global South voices. They also founded the JAHA Film Festival, an international showcase for trans 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.

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

As an organizer, Mama Ganuush has 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, IJAN, and QUIT. They have taught workshops at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and beyond. In 2025 they joined over 60 Portuguese LGBTI+ collectives opposing EuroPride's normalization of Israeli state violence.

Through every medium and action, Mama Ganuush presents Palestinians not as subjects of tragedy but as architects of freedom. Their work insists on a world where trans and queer people of the Global South are seen, resourced, and free.