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Huda Totonji
Huda Totonji was born in Riyadh, studied graphic design and fine art in the United States, and earned an ijazah (a master’s certificate) in Arabic calligraphy in Jordan. She works with calligraphy, mixed media, installation and performance, teaches design in Jeddah and has lectured at dozens of universities. She was the first person from Saudi Arabia to lecture at Harvard University.
Biography
Huda Ahmad Totonji is described as the first person from Saudi Arabia to lecture at Harvard. The date and subject of that lecture are not known.
She was born in Riyadh; her year of birth is unknown, and it is better not to guess it.
Her education is composite and its geography wide. She studied graphic design at the Art Institute of Washington, then took bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts at George Mason University. In Jordan she completed a full course in Islamic calligraphy and received an ijazah, a master’s certificate that gives the right to teach this kind of writing. She earned her doctorate in fine art in Ireland. She also holds a degree in visual information technology. Calligraphy remains one strand of her practice, but not the only one. She paints portraits, landscapes and still lifes, and makes works in mixed media, installations and performances. In her installations and performances she likes to use, for example, newspaper cuttings. She describes her own work this way: the female vision is central to what she makes.
She is president of Huda Art, LLC, which makes custom art for clients. Alongside this she teaches graphic design at Dar Al-Hekma College in Jeddah. She often lectures at universities in the Washington area and beyond: Georgetown University, George Washington University, Howard University, Oregon State University and Portland State University, Kansas State University and Penn State University, the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Texas A&M University, and also Griffith University in Brisbane.
She has taken part in more than twenty exhibitions in different countries. In 2009 the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow conference was held in Doha, Qatar. Totonji was among three hundred participants from 75 countries and was elected to represent Muslim women there.
Her work appears in the PBS documentary “Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet”. The Islamic Broadcasting Network (IBN) wrote that she brings “a sense of reality and humanity” to the idea of the Muslim woman, and that her goal is to overturn the notion that Muslim women are limited.
Profile notes