With her short fringe, choppy bob and vintage closet, Rama Duwaji looks every bit the Instagram cool girl. And that she is – but as the wife of Zohran Mamdani, she is also the newly anointed first lady of the Big Apple.
Mamdani’s successful bid to become Mayor of New York was fuelled by a snappy social media campaign which earned him legions of followers and wooed a record number of voters to the polls. He is the city’s youngest mayor in a century, and the first Muslim to hold the job. Meanwhile, 28-year-old Duwaji is the first Gen-Z first lady – a far cry from Mamdani’s opponent Andrew Cuomo’s wife Kerry Kennedy, the 66-year-old daughter of Robert F. Kennedy.
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Duwaji was born in Houston, Texas. Her parents are Syrian, and the family spent summers in Damascus before the war broke out in 2011. The family relocated to Dubai when Duwaji was nine. She briefly enrolled at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar before transferring to the main campus in the southern American state.
She is now a visual artist and illustrator who has had work published in the New Yorker, The Washington Post and Vogue.
Like her husband, Duwaji harnesses Instagram to put forward her message. She has been posting her art on the platform for over 10 years and told Yung magazine in an interview in April that it initially helped her to be “seen and heard” without having to wait for approval from traditional gatekeepers. Though she believes that recently, “algorithms have been more and more silencing and limiting, which I think leads to creatives doing more click-bait-y, self orientalizing things that they know people will eat up every time.”
Her Instagram features black and white digital illustrations alongside sultry selfies in a similarly monochrome wardrobe of one shouldered tops and vintage cowboy boots that would make any self-respecting Depop girlie go weak at the knees. Her follower count has already tripled in size this month, to over 400,000.
Mamdani is described as a democratic socialist and is a vocal supporter of Palestine. While Duwaji took a backseat in her husband’s campaign, their politics align.
“I’m not going to lie, things are dark right now in NYC. I worry for my friends and family, and things feel completely out of my hands,” she told Yung Magazine, adding that she uses her artistic voice to “speak out about what’s happening in the US and Palestine and Syria as much as I can.”
Dujani has illustrated documentaries for the BBC, including one about a woman living in Gaza who gave birth during the war and had to relocate nine different times due to Israeli air strikes. She has also spoken out against the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), who have been arresting everyone from immigrants to US citizens in crackdowns across New York.
In 2021 Duwaji moved to New York, and like good modern romantics, she and Mamdani met on Hinge. They were engaged last year and married in February this year at New York’s City Hall – Dujani wore a lacy knee length pixie-style dress, a fur coat, and a pair of beat up black leather boots. They rode the subway to get there.
Dujani did not prominently figure in her husband’s campaign – so much so that when he shared their wedding pictures in May, Duwaji commented in jest: “omg she’s real”. Yet she was a key figure behind the scenes. According to CNN, Duwaji helped define Zohran’s campaign identity, as well as developing the distinctive red and yellow typeface which is emblazoned across his campaign videos.
In his victory speech, Mamdani paid special tribute to his wife. “There is no one I would rather have by my side in this moment, and in every moment,” he said.
The pair are expected to move into Gracie Mansion, the 18th century, 5-bedroom clapboard mayoral home within an 11-acre park on the river in Upper East Side. It’s a far cry from the one-bedroom rent stabilised apartment they’d been living in across the river in Queens.
While her life is about to change dramatically, it seems that Duwaji will continue to do what she has always done. Just yesterday she shared a post to Instagram captioned “Things I saw in October that made me want to make art”. The pictures included paintings, a block of cement on the sidewalk and an ornately engraved service entrance sign on a downtown building. The casual observer would never have known that her husband was in the frantic final hours of his mayoral campaign – and that appears to be the way she likes it.
