Rama Duwaji

Rama Sawaf Duwaji (born June 30, 1997) is an American animator, illustrator, and ceramist. As the wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, she has been the first lady of New York City since January 2026.

Early life and education Rama Sawaf Duwaji was born on June 30, 1997 in Houston, Texas, to Syrian Muslim parents from Damascus. Her father, Marwan Duwaji, is a software developer, and her mother, Bariah Dardari, is a pediatrician who also worked on humanitarian missions in war zones with the Syrian American Medical Society; the couple had married shortly before her birth. and Duwaji spent the remainder of her childhood in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

Duwaji has described drawing as her solace, and she would often get in trouble for doodling in her textbooks and notebooks at school.

Duwaji then returned to her family in Dubai and participated in various artist residencies, including in Beirut, Lebanon, and in Paris, France, with a graduate thesis focused on making and sharing dishes as a communal act. Her work has been published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as British outlets and venues like the BBC and Tate Modern, and she has collaborated with Spotify and Apple.

Personal life

Duwaji met Zohran Mamdanithe son of academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nairon the dating app Hinge in 2021, when he was a member of the New York State Assembly. They were engaged in October 2024, and married in February 2025 in a civil ceremony at New York City Hall; She helped curate visuals for his campaign.

The couple resided in Mamdani's legislative district of Astoria, Queens, near Steinway Street,

Social media controversy

In March 2026, media outlets reported that, since the October 7 attacks, Duwaji had "liked" several Instagram posts supportive of Palestinian political violence and the Palestinian cause as a whole, which caused controversy due to her husband Zohran Mamdani's public position as New York City mayor. Mamdani commented that she is a private person who has held no formal role in his campaign or administration, and noted that the posts were "liked" before the couple married in early 2025 and before he launched his mayoral campaign in October 2024. Duwaji faced additional criticism for illustrating a work by a Gazan resident in a collection of stories compiled by Palestinian writer, author and activist Susan Abulhawa, who has made controversial statements deemed by some incendiary or outright racist regarding Jews and Israelis. In a press conference, Mamdani distanced himself from Abulhawa's words, which he qualified as "reprehensible", but, when asked about his wife's social media activity, he said that she is a "private person".

Around the same time, a report by the conservative outlet The Washington Free Beacon found that, during the 2013–17 period, Duwaji had posted on her social media content celebratory of Palestinian political violence, including support for PFLP members Leila Khaled and Shadia Abu Ghazaleh. The report highlighted her usage of racial slurs and statements such as "Fuck Tel Aviv." Other outlets also found her to have used the word "gay" in a derogatory manner.