Mama Ganuush is a Palestinian performance artist, and community organizer. Their work merges art with resistance against colonialism.
Born to a father displaced from Yafa during the Al-Nakba to the refugee camps in Gaza, and a mother from Gaza displaced during Al-Naksa, Mama Ganuush's life and art are rooted in Palestinian liberation. They identify as Trans Nonbinary and Muslim. They are also a survivor of conversion therapy and displacement, and live with multiple sclerosis. These experiences shape their advocacy for queer, disabled, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian rights.
Their performance art is Palestinian queer futurism. They blend Egyptian golden-era belly dance, Palestinian folk traditions, and improv theater. Through movement, they imagine what Palestinian art could have become without colonization. They dream of a queer Palestinian dance unfolding inside Cinema Al-Hambra in Yafa, where their father watched films before 1948.
Their writing builds Indigenous solidarity across continents. They compose poems in Arabic rooted in Indigenous forms, then collaborate with local artists to translate them into spoken and ancestral Indigenous languages. This creates living connections between Indigenous struggles worldwide.
Their 2025 short documentary A Message explores diaspora identity through a surrealist lens. It channels inherited trauma from their father's displacement and mother's Gaza roots into creative expression. The film premiered at the JAHA Film Festival in Lisbon.
Mama Ganuush founded the Heritage Activists and Liberation Artists Collective, known as HALA. It is a platform amplifying anti-colonial artists and centering Palestinian liberation through storytelling, community events, and performance arts.
They also created Cabaret Palestina in 2024, a fundraiser supporting drag artists who withdrew from San Francisco Pride in solidarity with Palestine. They launched Pink Wash, a sliding scale dance party in San Francisco where Palestinian and Indigenous people enter free and proceeds support Gaza mutual aid. They produce Salon HALA, a queer art salon benefiting mutual aid efforts in Gaza.
In 2025, they founded the JAHA Film Festival in Lisbon, celebrating trans and gender variant filmmakers from Indigenous communities and the Global South. They also established the JAHA Trans Liberation Film School, creating freely available curriculum with scholars.
Their organizing is rooted in the belief that queer liberation is inseparable from Palestinian freedom. They work with groups including AROC, Jewish Voice for Peace, IJAN, QUIT, and others.
In late 2023, they joined a federal lawsuit challenging U.S. funding of Israel's military campaign in Gaza. When the case was dismissed, they launched a hunger strike on October 19, 2024, demanding an end to the killing of Palestinians. They subsisted on fluids until their multiple sclerosis required others to continue, ultimately reaching 51 days.
In February 2024, they walked at New York Fashion Week, using the platform to protest genocide while calling out Getty Images for supplying imagery that sanitizes Israeli state violence.
They lead workshops at universities including Stanford, where they facilitated Defying Pinkwashing in the Trump Era. They support student movements at UC Berkeley and beyond, organizing die ins on Castro Street and co-organizing the No Pride in Genocide march.
When they learned EuroPride 2025's municipal commissioner had served as press attaché for the Israeli Embassy, they joined over 60 Portuguese LGBTI+ collectives in opposing EuroPride's normalization with human rights violators. Lisbon's authentic Pride stood with them.
Through every action, Mama Ganuush presents Palestinians not as subjects of tragedy but as architects of freedom, centering voices from outside the gender binary who are telling stories the world needs to see.
