CAFF Fundraiser with Mona Eltahawy: Arab Society & the Future

Saturday, October 22, 2011 at the Uptown Stage & Screen

Event Starts at 7:30 PM

The Calgary Arab Film Festival is proud to have acclaimed journalist Mona Eltahawy speak about Arab culture and how the West can truly support the uprisings of the Arab world in a proactive manner.

This is a fundraiser for the Calgary Arab Film Festival Society of Alberta in its effort to not just bring the best Arab films, but to help develop love of the Arts and Cultural industry in the Arab-Calgarian community.

There will always be a need for the truly authentic Arab-Canadian voice to be reflected in business, film, television, media and art and it is up to us all to help foster a healthy space for expression and discourse.

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Ms. Eltahawy's Bio.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. She is based in New York.

Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in The Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune and her columns appear in several other publications across the world. She is a frequent media guest analyst.

During the 18-day revolution that toppled Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, she appeared on most major media outlets, leading the feminist website Jezebel to describe her as “The Woman Explaining Egypt to the West”. Newsweek magazine said she was “in demand as a fresh, female counterweight to all the white-bearded professorial types.”

Before she moved to the U.S. in 2000, Ms Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, including in Cairo and Jerusalem as a Reuters correspondent and she reported for various media from Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China. Ms Eltahawy was the first Egyptian journalist to live and to work for a western news agency in Israel.

Her public speaking has taken her around the world, including to the first TEDWomen where she spoke about the virtues of confusion in breaking stereotypes of Muslim women.

In 2010 the Anna Lindh Foundation awarded her its Special Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Journalism and the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver gave her its Anvil of Freedom Award.

In 2009, the European Union awarded her its Samir Kassir Prize for Freedom of the Press for her opinion writing and Search for Common Ground named her a winner of its Eliav-Sartawi Award for Middle Eastern Journalism.

Ms. Eltahawy is a lecturer and researcher on the growing importance of social media in the Arab world. She has taught as an adjunct at the New School in New York, the University of Oklahoma and the U.N.-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica.
Mona was born on Aug. 1, 1967 in Port Said, Egypt and has lived in the U.K, Saudi Arabia and Israel. She calls herself a proud liberal Muslim. In 2005, she was named a Muslim Leader of Tomorrow by the American Society for Muslim Advancement and she is a member of the Communications Advisory Group for Musawah, the global movement for justice and equality in the Muslim family.