Deena Mohamed is an Egyptian designer and illustrator. She first began making comics at 18 when she created the viral webcomic strip “Qahera.” The comic addresses social issues and featured a visibly Muslim Egyptian super-heroine. It has been featured in multiple local and international outlets such as the BBC, Foreign Policy, The Times, Al Arabiya, and others, and has also been on the cover of two books published by the Harvard Press as well as the subject of multiple academic articles and journals. It was awarded Best Digital Comic Series by the Cairo Comix Festival (2015).
Her debut graphic novel, Shubeik Lubeik, was published in Arabic in 2018 and won two awards: Best Graphic Novel and the Grand Prize for the Cairo Comix Fesitval (2017), and was on display the musée de la bande dessinée in Angoulême as part of the Arab Comics Today exhibition. The English translation was recently acquired by Pantheon Books (US) and Granta Books (UK). In 2017 she was named by The Washington Post as one of “five women changing the world for the better” on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
At MacDowell in 2019, Deena completed the second volume of her award-winning graphic novel trilogy, Shubeik Lubeik. She drafted, inked, and lettered more than 150 pages. It was to be published in Arabic by Dar El-Mahrousa in November 2019. During her residency, she was featured on a panel at New York Comic Con.
