After Zohran Mamdani secured his historic victory in New York City’s mayoral race on Tuesday night, he was joined on stage by his wife, Rama Duwaji. In his celebratory speech, Mamdani paid tribute to her, saying, “There is no one I would rather have by my side in this moment and in every moment.”
When Mamdani is sworn in on January 1, 2026, Rama Duwaji will officially become the city’s first lady, marking another milestone alongside her husband’s. Zohran Mamdani will be New York’s first Muslim, first South Asian and first African-born mayor.
At 28, Rama Duwaji is a Syrian artist whose practice spans the digital realm, tracing the intersections of identity, belonging and emotion. Her illustrations and visual essays have appeared in publications including The New Yorker and The Washington Post. On her website, she writes that her work “examines the nuances of sisterhood and communal experiences.”
Born in Texas to Syrian parents and raised in Dubai from the age of nine, Duwaji brings a borderless sensibility to her art, shaped by movement, memory and the contradictions of diaspora. She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University before earning her MFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2024, following artist residencies in Lebanon and France.
Her work fuses the personal with the political, combining quiet gestures of womanhood with the visual language of protest. One illustration shows a young Palestinian girl holding an empty pot with the words “Not a hunger crisis,” before expanding to reveal a crowd with the text “It is deliberate starvation.” “As I was making this, Israel has been bombing Gaza nonstop with consecutive airstrikes,” she wrote in the caption.
Zohran and Rama’s story began, fittingly for a modern New York romance, not in a gallery or on a campaign trail but through a dating app. Long before Mamdani’s name became synonymous with city politics, the future mayor and the artist matched on Hinge.
“I met my wife on Hinge, so there is still hope in those dating apps,” he said on The Bulwark podcast.
When the couple decided to marry, they did so with characteristic simplicity. Without an entourage, Zohran and Rama took the train from Astoria to City Hall, where they exchanged vows in the City Clerk’s office as a close friend and photographer captured the moment.
“I’ve known [Mamdani] was going to marry Rama for years, and I was there, at the city clerk’s office with them when it happened,” photographer Kara McCurdy recalled.
“The three of us took the subway from Astoria to City Hall on a rainy day a few months back, and I got to celebrate two of my favourite people officially tying the knot.”
For her nuptials, Rama embodied an understated kind of cool in a white lace handkerchief dress, paired with black boots and a plush brown fur coat. The look was equal parts romantic and irreverent, a tableau of New York nonchalance that felt instinctively her own.
Beneath one of the wedding posts, a comment read, “hot girls for Zohran we must protect her” — a sentiment that seemed to capture the collective awe for a woman who had, without trying, become something of a modern muse.
Sharing the sweet photographs on Instagram, Mamdani used the post to speak directly to those who had negatively targeted his wife online.
“If you take a look at Twitter today, or any day for that matter, you know how vicious politics can be. I usually brush it off, whether it’s death threats or calls for me to be deported. But it’s different when it’s about those you love,” he wrote.
“Rama isn’t just my wife, she’s an incredible artist who deserves to be known on her own terms. You can critique my views, but not my family.”
Duwaji herself has remained measured and private. On election day, she posted a carousel of photo-booth pictures, a voting-sticker selfie and a childhood photo of her husband, captioned, “Couldn’t possibly be prouder.” The gesture was understated yet intimate, mirroring her presence throughout his campaign.
As New York steps into a new era, Duwaji’s quiet composure stands in contrast to the noise of city politics. If Mamdani’s campaign was about affordability and access, hers is about empathy and endurance.
