Rama Duwaji will be the youngest first lady New York City has ever had – thrust into the spotlight as her husband Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race. She is said to have been a driving force behind her husband’s success, according to CNN.
She was among those who finalised Mamdani’s brand identity, including the bold iconography and font used on his yellow, orange and blue campaign materials, it said.
Rama Duwaji is a Syrian-American illustrator, animator, and ceramist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in 1997 in Texas to a Syrian family, she spent her formative years between Houston and Dubai before moving to New York in 2021. At 28, Duwaji has established herself as an artist whose work centers Arab identity, women’s experiences, and political resistance through bold black-and-white portraiture.
Duwaji earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communication Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2019, studying initially at the school’s satellite campus in Doha, Qatar, before transferring to Richmond, Virginia. She completed a Master of Fine Arts in Illustration as Visual Essay at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2024, with her graduate thesis exploring making and sharing dishes as communal acts.
Her artistic practice uses drawn portraiture and movement to examine sisterhood and communal experiences, frequently depicting women of color in ways that challenge Western beauty standards. Her 2018 graphic novel Razor Burn, created as a semester-long project about mental health and societal issues, addressed body dysmorphia, anxiety, and depression among young teens of color, garnering widespread attention online. The wordless comic resonated across linguistic and cultural boundaries by focusing on imagery rather than text.
On Art and Political Responsibility
Duwaji views art as inherently connected to activism. In an April 2025 interview with YUNG, she drew on Nina Simone’s legacy, stating that “an artist’s duty as far as I’m concerned is to reflect the times,” asserting that “everyone has a responsibility to speak out against injustice” and that “art has such an ability to spread it.” She emphasizes that this responsibility extends beyond visual work: “Even creating art as a refuge from the horrors we see is political to me. It’s a reaction to the world around us. As long as you do the work in spaces outside your art, you’re still engaging with the world.”
More broadly, she noted that “art is inherently political in how it’s made, funded, and shared,” meaning that choices about production and distribution are never neutral. This philosophy guides her response to global crises. When discussing the burnout many face in times of crisis, she articulated: “We can’t have one without the other, and to me these are the moments that move me to draw, as much as the cause itself.”
Duwaji’s illustrations have been featured in major publications including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, BBC, and exhibited at Tate Modern in London. She has collaborated with Apple, Spotify, and VICE. Her work frequently addresses humanitarian crises in Gaza, Sudan, and Lebanon, as well as Israeli state violence and US immigration enforcement policies. Through minimalist lines and powerful imagery, she expresses solidarity with Palestine and Syria.
Beyond digital media, Duwaji creates hand-built ceramics, combining her illustration skills with pottery to produce handmade illustrated plates in blue and white. She has taught workshops on illustration, animation, and ceramics.
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