mona el husseini
DANCER & VISUAL ARTIST
projects
PROJECTS
ABOUT
about me
Mona El Husseini is a dancer and visual artist, based between Montreal and Cairo. She completed her dance education at the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center (CCDC) in Egypt and studied International Business and Contemporary Dance at Concordia University.
Since 2018, Mona has been choreographing and performing her own projects and dancing for other choreographers. Most recently she danced for Zab Maboungou / Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata as part of Mozongi Traces et Memoires Boite Chorégraphique in collaboration with La Fondation Jean-Pierre Perrault, and performed Mozongi in Yellowknife. She has also danced for MAAT dance company by Karima Mansour in Cairo and has collaborated with other choreographers such as Camille Lacelle Wisley, Meryem Alaoui, Libertad Pozo Rodriguez, and Olivier Dubois in Cairo and Montreal. She teaches contemporary dance, barre, and pilates in professional training programs and open-level workshops. Her pieces have been performed in Egypt, Germany, Italy, and Canada and in 2023 she was the recipient of the CAM+MAI joint support fellowship in dance. Her dance vocabulary is influenced by a decade-long training in Shaolin Kung Fu and Aikido as well as traditional Congolese and West African dance and
In 2023, Mona premiered Creatrix, a dance duet with her mother, and published Family Portraits, a graphic memoir and visual art series at the MAI (Montréal, Arts Interculturels), and presented them at the IFE (Institut Français d’Egypte) in Alexandria and Cairo the following year. She is currently developing Monday or Tuesday, a dance solo, and Rabbet Manzel // House Goddess, a visual art series.
In 2018, Mona had a performing role in When Arabs Danced, a TIFF- and FIFA-featured documentary film by Jawad Rhalib, and in 2024, she was the lead actress in Clermont-Ferrand featured short film ‘Mango’ by director Randa Ali. She was the choreographer of ‘Mama,’ a theatre piece by Nathalie Doummar, which was presented in 2022 at Théâtre Duceppe and at Festival Juste Pour Rire in Montreal.
Artistic Approach
In her artistic process, Mona goes beyond dance and traces the thread that connects the different art forms she practices including visual arts and writing. She is fascinated by the tangible and intangible layers that move a body and is interested in how stories are transmitted, shared, and told through the body across generations. She finds magic in the mundane and fosters intergenerational collaborations with artists and non-artists alike. She continues to search for dance in the encounter between the intimate and the collective, the traditional and the contemporary, and in the space where the inner and outer meet.