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Nagwa Abdelzaher Mohamed Bakr

Ministry of Antiquities

Community Engagement Officer

Country: Egypt

ITP Year: 2019

Biography

Nagwa has two master’s degrees in Anthropology and Museum Studies, and PhD which focused on the representation of women’s heritage in museums.

As a Community Engagement Officer at the Ministry of Antiquities, Nagwa oversees setting up community programmes aiming to engage local communities to benefit from the public knowledge available in museums and sites. Her projects especially target women and their engagement with local heritage and traditional crafts workshops.

For more than a year, Nagwa has been working on her project to document the culinary heritage of Upper Egypt, linking it to sustainability and identity, and providing many educational workshops on the art of cooking in a number of historical places.

Nagwa took part in The Museums Lab 2023 and as well as spending time in Europe (Berlin / Sweden Gothenburg at the Museum of World Culture), then the last phase travelled to Kenya and was able to connect with ITP fellows from across the country.

Most recently, with The Museums Lab, Nagwa is working on a project called El- Mastaba (a traditional construction in Egyptian villages).  The aim of the project is document the buildings as a living heritage place threaten by disappearance, then turn the idea into a space inside museums to welcome communities as a safe area to discuss, argue, and feeling connecting to each other.

Recently, Nagwa traveled with the exhibition “Ramses and the Gold of the Pharaohs” to Sydney, Australia which opened last November 2023.

Nagwa also participated in a research joint paper at a conference at the University of Lisbon on a recently initiated project “The Seventh Art, and the Civilization of the Seven Thousand Years: Reframing Popular Culture and History.” Additionally, she will present a research paper in Egypt at the Italian Institute in Cairo on “Women and the Heritage Interpretation: a case study of women from the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt.”

At the British Museum

During her time on the International Training Programme in 2019, Nagwa was based in the Department of Egypt and Sudan, and her partner placement was spent at Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester Museum and Whitworth Art Gallery.

In 2019 participants were asked to plan and propose a temporary exhibition around an object from the Museum’s collection working within the theme of journeys. Nagwa worked with Sanjeewani Upaka Widyarathne (Sri Lanka) on her Object in focus project. Their exhibition proposal was titled Spiritual Journey.

Legacy projects

In November 2022 Nagwa participated in an ITP legacy project based on the Museums Association Conference held in Edinburgh. As part of this week, with fellows from Armenia, Guatemala, India, Philippines, Romania, Rwanda and Uzbekistan.  Nagwa attended a programme structured around the 3-day MA Conference exploring how museums can create better places to live and work.