This week, Zohran Mamdani won the race to become the next mayor of New York City in one of the nation’s most closely watched elections. A Democratic socialist who campaigned alongside Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo in both the primary and the general election.
But beyond the political headlines, there’s a Richmond connection worth celebrating. Mamdani is married to Rama Duwaji, who will now serve as New York’s First Lady, and, as it turns out, is also one of our own.
Duwaji is a recent graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Communication Arts and Design program, where she studied illustration and animation. She first attended VCU’s School of the Arts in Qatar before transferring to the Richmond campus, where she held her first public exhibition.
As a fellow VCU alum from the same program, it feels right to celebrate one of ours stepping onto one of the biggest stages in the country, and to take a closer look at her art.
Duwaji’s work centers on family, her Syrian heritage, and the universal need to be heard. Through soft, expressive portraiture and fluid animation, she explores the intimacy of shared experience like sisterhood, migration, and identity with a warmth that connects across borders. Whether working digitally or shaping clay into illustrated ceramics, her art feels deeply human, grounded in empathy and community.
In an April interview with YUNG, Duwaji described her art as being born from passion rather than ambition.
“These days, I focus on making art about my experiences and the things I care about, and the community that forms from conversations about my work, both online and in person, happens organically,” she told the outlet. “I make my work for people who care about the things I care about.”
Here are a few pieces that show how she weaves those themes into her work.
Art by Rama Duwaji
At first glance, Rama Duwaji’s illustrations look gentle: bold lines and open eyes that invite you in. But give them a moment and you can see these are soft drawings about hard things. Her figures lock arms, rest in one another’s presence, or stare out from the page with a quiet knowing.
Now based in Brooklyn, Duwaji is a Syrian illustrator and animator whose work is shaped by both heritage and community, an ongoing dialogue between home and diaspora, intimacy and resistance. She uses drawn portraiture and motion to explore how people, especially women, carry history in their gestures.
In her YUNG conversation, she described her work as existing “in the spaces in between” between activism and introspection, protest and pause. She talks about tenderness as a form of resistance, saying that the simple act of rest or care can be revolutionary when the world insists on exhaustion.
Her visual language recalls the intimacy of zines and protest posters but with a narrative rhythm closer to animation. Duwaji isn’t just an illustrator but an animator, one who thinks in motion. Her storytelling stretches from editorial work (The New Yorker, The Washington Post, BBC, Apple, Spotify, VICE, Tate Modern*) to hand-built ceramics.
Even the quieter works, a woman asleep in tall grass, two figures reflecting each other in stillness, pulse with that same conviction: care as a political act, tenderness as testimony.
Duwaji also understands the strange double life of being an artist online. In that YUNG interview, she reflected on how social media opened new space for Arab and Syrian creatives, but also created new forms of pressure, the demand to explain, to perform, to brand. It’s a tension she navigates carefully, turning her feed into something more like a gathering place than a portfolio.
At a time when illustration too often chases trends or algorithms, Duwaji’s work stands apart. It’s not designed to go viral; it’s designed to last. Rooted, intentional, and aware of its lineage, her art speaks softly but carries the weight of a people’s story.
And her story began where a lot of good things do, right here in Richmond.
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