Hwar AlMadar: Victoria and Albert Museum and King's Foundation

Dr. Rosser-Owen completed her PhD in Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford in 2002. She has been a curator in the Middle Eastern section at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) since then, specializing in the arts of the Arab world, with a particular focus on the Islamic Mediterranean and North Africa.

She is the author of several publications, including Islamic Arts from Spain (2010) and Articulating the Ḥijāba: Cultural Patronage and Political Legitimacy in al-Andalus.

In 2015, she received an Art Fund New Collecting Award to research and acquire contemporary craft from Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt. This work later led to her curation of Contemporary Ceramic Art from the Middle East, exhibited at the V&A in 2021.

She recently co-organized Ceramics from Islamic Lands, the first large-scale online conference dedicated to this field.

 Mikey Muhanna is the Founder and Executive Director of Afikra, a global movement dedicated to reframing the narrative about the Arab world through community events, academy courses, podcasts, and its magazine, Daftar. What began on a Brooklyn rooftop in 2014 has grown into a world-class education and media platform, reaching a community of 200,000+ members across 30 global chapters, with a robust content library featuring hundreds of talks and millions of views.

Dr Desmond Lazaro, born in 1968 in Leeds, is a British citizen presently based in Pondicherry. Captivated by the historic painting traditions of Rajasthan, he studied for twelve years under Jaipur Master Bannu Ved Pal Sharma, to master miniature painting techniques. His PhD thesis on the Pichhwai painting tradition was submitted to the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London. He has not only learnt the painting techniques but also researched and written on pigments, papers and cloth that he uses in his creative process. He follows the ancient tradition of creating pigments by hand from semi-precious mineral stone, organic, alchemical, and earth derivations, that are classified not by their color, but from where the pigment is derived. Desmond’s work, as well as his personal history, spans East and West, and his paintings have been exhibited extensively in India, the UK, and Germany.

The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts (KFSTA), a core charity of His Majesty King Charles III, furthers his vision of fostering appreciation for the universal values underlying the world’s great art traditions. The school’s teaching emphasizes that understanding traditional arts is inseparable from understanding the natural order and humankind’s place within it.
KFSTA has pioneered postgraduate education rooted in practice, offering Masters and Doctoral degrees in the UK and extending its ethos through public Open Programme courses and international Outreach Programmes. Over the last 30 years, the school has expanded its reach, with programs in over 20 countries, and established centers for long-term education in Egypt, Azerbaijan, China, and Saudi Arabia.

Founded in AH 1268/1852 CE, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is a family of museums dedicated to the power of creativity. The V&A celebrates and shares-through a program of exhibitions, events, educational and digital experiences—a collection of 2.8 million objects, support for new works, and a commitment to conservation, research, and sustainable design to inspire the makers, creators, and innovators of today. The V&A holds over 19,000 items from the Middle East and North Africa, from the early Islamic period to now.
In AH 1444/2023 CE, The Diriyah Biennale Foundation supported the V&A to create the Ramadan Pavilion in London, to celebrate the lived experiences of Muslims across the UK. In AH 1445/2024 CE, the V&A opened the seventh edition of the Jameel Prize, an international award for contemporary art and design supported by Art Jameel. The prize explores the relationship between contemporary practice and Islamic tradition as part of a wider debate about Islamic culture in the 15th century AH/21st century CE.
Recognizing AlMadar as a rare and unique cultural moment drawing together and juxtaposing collections of historical objects from Islamic civilizations from around the world, the V&A joins with a presentation of drawings made at the Alhambra by Owen Jones, Nasrid woodwork, and an 11th-century AH/17th-century CE manuscript by Abulrahman al-Sufi.