At fourteen, someone once told me I would become a citizen of the world. I did not believe it. Growing up as a young woman in Egypt, mobility came with conditions.
To my surprise, my work took me across the world and allowed me to live in different cities. I met people -literally- from all walks of life. I am who I am today thanks to those people and places.
I worked in international organizations and development cooperation, I got my Master’s, and I believed I could be part of the change. Later on, I began to question the assumptions embedded in international development. I saw solutions that looked good on paper but not in practice. I wrote my thesis quoting Easterly’s "The White Man’s burden” while describing my work in development cooperation.
That questioning led me to systems change and social innovation, a fascinating field. A turn of events led me to consulting. My right brain was happy, structure, processes, indicators, and more indicators.
Could I stay still? Of course not, I began to question how restrictive traditional means of evaluation were, whose knowledge counts, and whose voices are centred. I turned to participatory evaluation.
Art also came to my rescue as a facilitator and evaluator. I faced teams with significant power dynamics, and so people struggled to verbalize the change they wanted to see. Art became an equalizer, allowing all to speakup. When indicators were not enough, stories made the change shine. When traditional research tools were restrictive, arts-based methods were just right.
As my portfolio grew, and with it the profile of the organizations served and the complexity of assignments, I saw how our sector was not a safe place for all. Safeguarding was practiced with the communities served, but inside organizations, power dynamics were harmful. I turned to Music Therapy, dropped out because of an unsafe learning environment, and then found my ideal school -intercultural, intersectional, and power-aware- and started an Art Therapy and Community Art postgraduate Diploma (+ a certificate in Liberation Psychology). It is also at this time that I dared to showcase and sell my artwork.
My professional journey and my artistic journey are not separate. They inform one another. The evaluator in me seeks clarity and structure; the artist in me questions, distorts, and reimagines. Together, they shape how I design processes and hold space.
I hesitated a lot to make both those identities visible, but I now know that this is what makes my work unique.