Calgary Arab Film Festival

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Mona Eltahawy - Guest Speaker

Fund Raising Event

The Calgary Arab Film Festival is proud to host acclaimed journalist Mona Eltahawy to speak about Arab culture and how the West can support the growing Arab art world.

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

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.

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."

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