Across the Arab world and its far-flung diasporas, a new generation of women is reshaping how stories are told. Whether through fashion that resurrects forgotten lineages, research that reframes what history remembers, video essays that decode media myths, or talent agencies rewriting the rules of representation, these creatives share a common mission: to carve space for narratives too often overlooked. Their work is subtle yet seismic, rooted in care, intellect, and cultural imagination. In a landscape where visibility rarely matches contribution, it feels essential to spotlight those building archives, crafting universes, and shifting perspectives from the margins outward.
KHAMSA rounds up five women who are recalibrating the conversation.
١. Salma Chouqair (Morocco/Montreal): Charting Amazigh futures from the archive outward.
If Amazigh and North African heritage had a digital astrolabe, Salma Chouqair is the one recalibrating its constellations. The Montreal-based art historian founded Bayt Zuhal as both refuge and rebellion—a living platform where Indigenous archives, speculative storytelling and decolonial research methodologies collide. What began as a personal inquiry into erasures within Western academic canons has grown into a global, fiercely engaged community: a digital house where ancestral textiles sit beside cosmic futurisms, where oral histories morph into pedagogical tools, and where an Amazigh past is neither frozen nor folklorized but endlessly reimagined. Chouqair curates Bayt Zuhal with the precision of a scholar and the intuition of a storyteller, pulling threads from post-colonial theory, ecological memory and Indigenous cosmologies to craft content that feels at once educational and insurgent. Bayt Zuhal is more than a platform; it’s a methodology, a counter-archive in how creativity is remembered.
٢. Ruaa El Mansuri (Libya/UK): The designer stitching forgotten worlds back into the present.
Few designers wield fabric like a spellbook, but Ruaa El Mansuri has turned sartorial sorcery into a vocation. The Libyan-British creative raids personal memory and museum vitrines with equal fervor, weaving Amazigh motifs into Edwardian shapes, pairing razor-sharp corsetry with veils that seem to dissolve mid-air. A graduate of Central Saint Martins’ MRes Art programme, she emerged not just with a degree but a question that still haunts her practice: how do you dress erased histories? Her answer—now an evolving archive of deadstock lace, ancestral silhouettes and digitally-rendered phantasmagoria—feels like wearing a reclaimed narrative.
El Mansuri’s garments tiptoe between ceremony and rebellion: a hooded corset dress that reads like a Regency heroine meeting her Libyan foremothers, Barbiecore silks rendered as shimmering armour, shadows of fairytales stitched into technically ferocious construction. Her research, spanning folklore, colonial archives and emotional archaeology, anchors the dreaminess with rigor. Whether she’s reimagining looted artefacts through cloth or photographing her pieces like scenes from an unmade film, El Mansuri is building not just clothes, but universes—worlds where softness is also shield, where longing becomes structure, and where a young Libyan girl watching her grandmother weave finally gets to rewrite the story in her own thread.
٣. Sara Mustafa Green (Amman/Montréal): Decoding the Arab world’s narratives, one meticulous video essay at a time.
Part researcher, part storyteller, and part cultural cartographer, Sara Mustafa Green moves fluidly between Amman and Montréal, mapping how media, politics, and collective memory sculpt the stories we tell about the Arab world—and the ones told about us. With academic roots in European Affairs, Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science, she brings sharp analytical depth to the digital sphere, where her long-form YouTube video essays have quietly become essential viewing for a growing community of 3,000+ subscribers. Her episodes—ranging from meditations on Arab girlhood in pop culture, to dissections of diaspora identity, misrepresentation, gender tropes, or the political afterlives of media icons.
٤. Amira Lamti (Tunisia): Unravelling the choreography of ritual and inheritance.
Tunisian visual artist Amira Lamti moves between photography, video and textile with the instinct of someone piecing together a living archive. Born in Sousse in 1996, and trained at the Institut supérieur des Beaux-Arts, she has long used her lens to seize the gestures, pauses and quiet ceremonies of everyday life—intimate fragments that become portals into something older than memory. Her recent work turns toward El Machta, the ancestral figure who guides the bride through the Jeloua ritual: a choreography of gold, open palms, and seven circular turns invoking Tanit, fertility and cosmic blessing. Lamti approaches the ritual not as static folklore but as a fluid continuum—an inheritance passed through women’s bodies, voices, garments and intentions. In Bent El Machta, she stitches family footage of her grandmother (herself a Machta) into contemporary images, letting textiles, artifacts and moving portraits bleed into one another.
The result is a delicate collapsing of time, where ancient rites slip into the present and matrimonial gestures become conduits between personal memory and collective heritage. Exhibited from Sousse to Barcelona to Amman, Lamti’s practice insists that tradition is not preserved but continually reanimated—relearned, re-performed, and returned to the living.
٥. Salma Mousa launches al Agency: Spotlight on Arab talent in the global frame.
In 2025, Salma Mousa founded al Agency, a Levant-rooted talent house dedicated to elevating Arab and Palestinian creatives on the international stage. As the agency’s unmistakable face and driving force, Mousa has curated a roster of more than fifteen emerging voices across fashion, film, and performance—each chosen for their cultural authenticity, creative rigor, and global potential.
Among the standout talents she champions is Sereen Khass, lead actor in Ambush(2025), a Jordan–Canada short film directed by Yassmina Karajah that has drawn attention for its intimate portrayal of teenage girlhood under pressure. Another key rising voice connected to the agency’s ecosystem is Sofia Asia, part of the ensemble surrounding Palestine 36, the feature selected as Palestine’s submission to the 98th Academy Awards—a milestone moment for regional cinema.
al Agency’s mission is clear: to move Arab representation beyond token visibility and toward long-term, strategic cultural presence. Under Salma Mousa’s leadership, the agency is carving out space for a new generation of Arab artists to be seen, heard, and centered on their own terms.
