Wafa Ghnaim is a dress historian, curator, author, and fashion researcher specializing in Palestinian embroidery traditions. Through the Tatreez Institute, founded in 2016, she brings rigorous historical scholarship into both her research and her practice, teaching various audiences around the world and advising fashion designers, stylists, and cinematic productions on the ethical and informed use of Palestinian dress. Her expertise includes the authentication of Palestinian and Syrian embroidery and dress by time period, technique, and construction, as well as fluency in the symbolic visual systems that serve as biographical inscriptions. Ghnaim has dedicated her career to recovering this visual language, resisting cultural appropriation, and discrediting reductive representations that frame Palestinians solely through an Orientalist, ancient, or biblical past.

Dedicated to safeguarding intangible cultural heritage and preventing cultural erasure, the Tatreez Institute also stewards a growing collection of traditional dresses and headdresses from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan rematriated from dumpsters, estates, and households across the world. This study collection facilitates the research that is published by Ghnaim, and is stewarded through Palestinian hands. Through research, education, and restoration practices, the Institute ensures that the art of embroidery in Palestine, inclusive of the practices, skills, knowledge and rituals as inscribed by UNESCO in 2021, continues to be studied, practiced, and transmitted across generations living in exile.

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