Mona El Husseini is a dancer and visual artist, based between Montreal and Cairo. She completed her dance education at the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center (CCDC) in Egypt and studied International Business and Contemporary Dance at Concordia University.
Mona choreographs and performs her own artistic projects, she collaborates with other artists as a choreographer and performer, and she also teaches contemporary dance, barre, and pilates. Her pieces have been performed in Egypt, Germany, Italy, and Canada.
At the time of writing, Mona is working on Creatrix, a dance duet with her mother, and on Family Portraits, a visual art series and a graphic memoir set to premiere at the MAI (Montréal, Arts Interculturels) in 2023. She is also developing Monday or Tuesday, a dance solo, and Rabbet Manzel // House Goddess, a visual art series – both of which were presented at upRising Up festival in Puglia, Italy, in 2022. In 2018, Mona had a performing role in When Arabs Danced, a TIFF- and FIFA-featured documentary film by Jawad Rhalib, and in 2022, she was the lead actress in Gigi and in Mango, two short films by director Randa Ali. That same year she choreographed Mama, a theatre piece by Nathalie Doummar, which was presented at Théâtre Duceppe and at Festival Juste Pour Rire in Montreal.
In her artistic process, Mona goes beyond dance and traces the thread that connects the different art forms she practices including martial arts, visual arts, and writing. She is interested in how stories are transmitted, shared, and told through the body across generations. She finds the dance in the encounter between the intimate and the collective, the traditional and the contemporary, and in the space where the inner and outer meet.
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Hala Farahat is a Biology teacher based in Montreal, Canada. After giving up her medical career to raise her children, she has held diversified teaching and administrative positions in International schools in the U.A.E, Egypt, Ontario, Quebec, and most recently in New York. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Education at the University of Ottawa and her Master’s degree in Educational Technology at Concordia University. Among many things, she is a passionate advocate for the implementation of technology to promote pedagogical strategies and enhance students’ engagement through creating flipped classrooms and project-based learning. Besides that, she is an avid practitioner of conjoining the worlds of Art and Science, both in her classrooms and out.
