Saba Hamzah is a poet-scholar, author, and educator based in The Netherlands. Her main devices are line and light and the moments in between. She works with alternative pedagogies and artistic practices to promote justice, inclusion, and peacebuilding through art, training, policy advice, and creating innovative ideas, drawing on her expertise and interest in art, history, and gender studies.
Saba’s work questions the power structures of societies at large, using art and literary interventions as tools for education, social mediation, and transformation, and her scholarship activates silences in living archives of women in the conditions of diaspora and exile. She founded the Yemeni Woman's Archive, an initiative to curate, document, and shine light on the knowledge produced by/about Yemeni women.
Born in Yemen, she lived and studied in Sana’a (Literature and Education, Yemen UST) until 2015. Since then, she lived in Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, and in 2018 she moved to the Netherlands.
In 2020, Saba obtained a master's degree in gender studies from Utrecht University. In 2021 she was appointed as a Research Associate at the Research Center for Material Culture of the National Museum of World Cultures.
Saba has more than 15 years of experience in education, writing, and training. She has worked independently with many prominent educational and Media institutions in MENA and Europe and has given lectures/talks on many occasions.
In Yemen, Saba worked among a distinguished group of women at the University of Science and Technology, creating projects and curating conferences, festivals, and artistic competitions. One major project was the establishment of the women's magazine Amal/Hope where they published more than 6000 copies.
She writes for different platforms and magazines, as she uniquely blends art and literature with everyday politics. Her work has been published in four languages, and her books are held by multiple international libraries, such as the Library of Congress and Harvard University.
News
Panelist
Studies of Belonging
Saba presented her work Stranded on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the conference on Studies of Belonging from 9-11 June 2021.
Guest Lecture.
Our Shared Heaven
On March 2, 2021, Saba presented her project Our Shared Heaven
( light and line: poetry and photography) at Brown Bag Diversity Meeting at UCU part of the course Postcolonial interventions.
Rosanna Fund for Women
Fellowship 2020
On International Women's Day 2020, Saba received an Honorable Mention Award from Rosanna Fund for women 2020. The goal of the Rosanna Fund is stimulating the academic education of talented women at Utrecht University.