Wafa Ghnaim: Tatreez, Ancient Fashion & Cultural Heritage | Sumud Podcast

🎙️ This week on the Sumud Podcast, we sit down with dress historian and fashion researcher Wafa Ghnaim for a profound exploration of how Palestinian material culture carries memory, identity, and truth across generations. Through the dresses, headdresses, and stitched motifs that define our heritage, Wafa reveals how every thread holds stories far deeper than the colonial timeline. She reflects on exile, reclaiming beauty through a non-Western lens, growing up Palestinian in the United States, the emotional weight of Syria, the urgency of documenting elders’ knowledge, and the dangers of cultural appropriation. This conversation is an intimate look at the power of dress as resistance, continuity, and home, and the sacred responsibility of preserving what our ancestors left for us.

🌍 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, focusing on traditional embroidery techniques, historic reconstruction and oral history. Her publications include “Tatreez & Tea,” THOBNA (2023), Tatreez Companion (2024), and Tatreez Beauty (2024). She continues her mother’s legacy through the Tatreez Institute, founded in 2016, which stewards a collection of over 180 dresses and headdresses from Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon for preservation, education, and research. She was the first Palestinian and Syrian embroidery instructor for the Smithsonian Museum, earned a senior interdisciplinary research fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was named by Vogue, alongside her mother, as “the world’s leading guardians of tatreez.” Wafa is now a Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Museum of the Palestinian People.

🔑 In this conversation, we explore

➡ The deep history and symbolism of Palestinian dress

➡ Why material culture carries memory across generations

➡ Cultural appropriation and the ethics of teaching tatreez

➡ The social life of objects and what dresses remember

➡ Syria, exile, grief and generational trauma

➡ Beauty, identity and decolonizing aesthetics

➡ The Tatreez Institute and the future of dress research

⏱ Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:57 Who Is Wafa Ghnaim?

06:54 Beauty, Arab Glamour & Decolonizing Aesthetics

13:49 Preserving Elders’ Knowledge Through Oral History

24:25 Cultural Appropriation & Teaching Boundaries

29:44 Syria, Exile & Emotional Collapse

38:12 The Tatreez Institute & The 184-Dress Collection

56:05 Dresses as Memory, Material Witness & Legacy

1:15:11 Final Reflections

Sponsored by: The Karate Attorney (@karateattorney) fighting for justice inside and outside the courtroom. Visit www.KarateAttorney.com.

Sponsored by: The School of Radical Imagination (@school.of.radical.imagination), a new learning space turning knowledge into action through live, community-based courses on justice, liberation, and creativity. Enroll at www.RadicalImagination.school.

📚 Explore Tatreez Institute publications at https://www.tatreezandtea.com/publications

🎬 Full episode on: https://sumudpod.com

📲 Follow on Instagram: @tatreezandtea | @thetatreezinstitute | @dredhasan | @sumudpod

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