Ronia Ibrahim

INFO

Name	Ronia Ibrahim (she/her)
Born	2000
Country of Birth	Taiwan
Place of Residence	Naarm Melbourne, Pōneke Wellington
Ethnicities	Taiwanese, Bengali
Artform	Literature, Visual arts, Design, Zines, Poetry, Socially engaged art
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Ronia Ibrahim is a writer, artist and zinemaker of Bangladeshi and Taiwanese descent, currently based in Naarm Melbourne. Published across Aotearoa and Australia, Ibrahim’s work is centered on diasporic storytelling and “reimagining the migrant identity through memory, faith, food and history”. Her writing extends across performance, written poetry, visual narrative, and non-fiction. Ibrahim is also the co-founder of Moon Musings, a Ramadan-themed poetry zine series.

Originally living between Taiwan and Bangladesh, Ibrahim immigrated to Aotearoa in the early 2000s as a toddler, where her family settled in Lower Hutt. She reflects on her experiences growing up in Lower Hutt as difficult: “I was made to feel like a spectacle. I was different, by default”. These moments of isolation led Ibrahim to distance herself from her culture, commenting that it was a way to keep herself safe. However, art and writing were always a source of comfort, even from a young age: “As a shy, anxious kid…creative outlets are where I found a voice”.

From 2019 to 2022, Ibrahim studied design and English literature at Victoria University Wellington - a period through which she began to creatively express and explore her background as a biracial Muslim woman more explicitly. She references her university assignments as an opportunity to “not-so-subtly investigate [her] own life and identity”. Her comic, How to be Brown: and other crises of a biracial woman in NZ, originally created for a comics course at Victoria University, was republished by The Pantograph Punch.

During this time, Ibrahim’s work across poetry and essays found a home in publications such as Starling, Newsroom and Turbine | Kapohau. Shaped by her multicultural background, Ibrahim’s writing often evokes the sensory aspects of diasporic and migrant nostalgias - food is a common motif in her poetry. Performance poetry is another core part of Ibrahim’s practice and she was a finalist for both the 2021 Wellington Poetry Slam and 2022 NZ Poetry Slam. Describing the act of performing her poetry, Ibrahim says: “For someone who often feels really brown and really small, standing at a local poetry reading or sitting in a classroom, it can feel really empowering to be given the space to detail my experiences”. In September 2024, Ibrahim was featured as part of Proudly Asian Theatre’s Fresh Off The Page programme, where her script, The Colours of Our Katha, was presented live at Bats Theatre. Directed by Lynda Chanwai-Earle, the script used poetry to explore themes of belonging, war, and history in 1971 East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh). She was also the recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship in 2024, where she worked on an upcoming poetry collection.

Beyond her writing, Ibrahim is also a curator, designer and zinemaker. In 2021, she worked with Kia Mau Festival to curate a migrant poetry showcase, Before I Go Home, alongside writer Khadro Mohamed. In the same year, Ibrahim and Mohamed created Moon Musings, a collaborative zine to showcase Muslim writers and artists across Aotearoa. Ibrahim was also a guest curator for NANSEN in 2022 - a Berlin-based independent magazine that focuses on migrant issues across the world.

Ibrahim's design and illustration work has been featured in various media outlets and exhibition spaces, including Te Papa’s Chinese Languages in Aotearoa zine, as well as being a part of In Essence - an exhibition to showcase female Muslim artists at Bankstown Arts Centre. Traditional art techniques and cultural motifs often underpin Ibrahim’s design and typographic work: “As a designer, I excavate and enable the visual beauty of my identity.” Her 2022 art installation, treasure map, featured henna ornamentation and kantha, a traditional Bengali stitching technique.

Ibrahim currently resides in Melbourne, Australia where she works as a designer, and continues to publish her work in both Australian and New Zealand journals.