Maya El Helou

Maya El Helou is a queer Arab comic artist, researcher, and ethnographer from Beirut.  El Helou is currently a Ph.D. candidate and course instructor, working within both the Department of Anthropology and the collaborative Sexual Diversity Studies program at the University of Toronto.

El Helou is a graphic ethnographer who engages queer methods in the world of anthropology and sexuality studies, including but not limited to comics, visuals, and the sensorial as ethnographic methods, where the writing canvas becomes a portal to the unspoken, a bridge between worlds that words alone cannot traverse. El Helou’s scholarly pursuits orbit around the spheres of gender, sexuality, affect, feminist studies, spatiotemporality, revolutions, embodiment, existence, the sensorial, infrastructure, and life and death. Maya utilizes salient forms of art, humor, and theory as tools to distill Queer and feminist theories into accessible forms of knowledge for the public.

In addition, El Helou is a gender and sexuality expert with more than a decade of experience in advocacy and capacity building in the human rights realm. In 2015, El Helou was awarded the Magda al-Nowaihi Award for best MA thesis in gender studies at the American University in Cairo. Between 2017 and 2019, El Helou occupied the MENA region liaison position for civil society at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Beyond the academic arena, Maya is a DJ and the founder of the MaziQa party collective that works on bringing the Arab community together through music in Toronto.