Friends of Baghdad

We are a digital initiative to spread the cultural knowledge about Mesopotamian relics as they relate to the world cultural heritage.

Created by Nina-Leila Mussa

About Nina-Leila Mussa

Friends of the Baghdad Museum is the NGO brainchild by Nina-Leila Mussa, a high schooler at Horace Mann School following her mesmerizing visit to Baghdad (Iraq) in the spring of 2019.
Nina is a founder and dreamer with a purpose; a high schooler at Horace Mann in the Bronx on a mission. She loves art & culture, an avid photographer, world-traveler and is fascinated by the Mesopotamian world heritage legacy. She is passionate about women empowerment and social-justice through education and economic initiatives. She has been interning during the summers with Alfanar.org, a non-profit micro-finance venture for social-economic development in the Middle East with a particular focus on Women Education, empowerment and youth access to education and skills training.
In her free time, she volunteers at the AAFSC in Brooklyn where she acts as a peer mentor. She is involved with the first Tee Golf local chapter.

FBM is a digital initiative to spread the cultural knowledge about Mesopotamian relics as they relate to the world cultural heritage. It targets school children and teachers by providing content, photo albums and coloring booklets about the museum for purchase.

Mission

The proceeds are then used in two main areas:

Provide a digital English language course to the predominantly female staff of the museum so they can cater to a more international audience, and

Provide English Children books to the foundation “Ana Iraqi and I read) as a means to further enhance cultural dialogue and break accessibility barriers

This event culminates in a yearly virtual fundraiser that hopes to add a permanent English bookshop in the famous historical Mutanabbi street. The Friday outlet to families where cafes, bookstalls, art stores abound in continuity in the backyard of the famous Mustansiriyah School built during the golden age of Baghdad under the Abbasid Dynasty.

Podcast

Wassan Al-Khudhairi is the Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) and the former Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art where she organized Third Space /shifting conversations about contemporary art. She was invited to be a Curator for the 6th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan in 2017 and Co-Artistic Director for 9th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea in 2012. Serving as the Founding Director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, Al-Khudhairi oversaw the opening of the Museum in 2010 and co-curated Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art and curated Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab. More recently, she has been appointed as one of the Focus curators for the 2021 Armory Show. Her work predominantly focuses on modern and contemporary art from the Arab World.

Baghdadia · Baghdadia: Professor Zainab Bahrani

Dr. Zainab Bahrani is an Iraqi professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. She investigates the meaning of images and of art in general, addressing both ancient and modern philosophies of representation: one of which, the Hellenization of Ishtar, was particularly intriguing to me. She discusses concepts of the body and ideologies of gender in both ancient Greece and the Near East. Another aspect of Bahrani’s work has been in the area of Mesopotamian monument preservation, conservation and the politics of cultural heritage of the ancient cradle of civilization: we should all look to preserve the past!

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