Umayya Abu-Hanna

Umayya Abu-Hanna is a Palestinian-Finnish writer, journalist, and former member of the Helsinki City Council born in Haifa, Israel into a Palestinian family. She moved to Finland in 1981. In 2011, she moved to Amsterdam where she resides with her South African daughter.

Career

In the 1980s, Abu-Hanna was a member of the Helsinki City Council and a member of the Real Estate Board of Helsinki.
In the 1990s, she was a journalist, documentary maker and columnist. She became known to the wider public as the first non-white presenter of the weekly current affairs news-program Ajankohtainen Kakkonen at the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE.
In the 2000s, she was member of the Arts Council Finland and was the first chair of its Multicultural Board. Abu-Hanna was also the cultural diversity adviser of the Finnish National Gallery.
Her first novel, Nurinkurin, was published in 2003. Her book on identity, Sinut, was published in 2007. A manual for the cultural field, Multikulti, was published in 2012. A cultural history of modern Helsinki, Alienin Silmin, was published in 2014. She co-authored A changing world, perspectives on heritage, with case studies of museums in Afghanistan.