About Wafa Ghnaim

Wafa Ghnaim is a dress historian, researcher, author, archivist, curator, educator and embroiderer who learned from her mother, award-winning artist Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim. Wafa specializes in Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Lebanese dress history, with a focus on traditional embroidery techniques, historic reconstruction and oral history.

Wafa’s first book, “Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora” (first ed 2016; second ed 2018), documents the traditional patterns and stories passed on to her by her mother. She has released a number of publications since, including THOBNA (2023), Tatreez Companion (2024), Tatreez Beauty: A Coloring Book (2024), and has additional research published with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Institute for Palestine Studies, and more. 

Wafa continues her mother’s educational legacy through the Tatreez Institute, a global arts education initiative she founded in 2016 through which she has taught Palestinian, Syrian and Jordanian embroidery and history to thousands of students, lecturing at leading institutions, museums and universities around the world. The Tatreez Institute stewards a collection of over 180 dresses and headdresses from Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon that were rematriated from households and shops across North America for the purpose of preservation, education, publication and research of intangible cultural heritage in the diaspora.

Wafa was the first Palestinian and Syrian embroidery instructor for the Smithsonian Museum (2017-2021) and earned a senior interdisciplinary research fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Antonio Ratti Textile Center and the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art (2023-2024). Wafa has been featured in major media outlets throughout the duration of her career, including Vogue Magazine, which named her and her mother “the world’s leading guardians of tatreez”.

Wafa now serves as Curator at the Museum of the Palestinian People, where she leads a research initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation.