Heba Barakat

Heba Barakat

The Triumph of the Word: Contemporary Islamic Calligraphy Collections at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia

Heba Nayel Barakat is head of the Curatorial Affairs Department at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, where she supervises the refurbishment of the museum’s permanent galleries, researches artifacts in the collection, and supervises exhibitions in the museum’s special galleries. A graduate of the American University in Cairo with a B.A. in Islamic Art & Architecture, Barakat has an M.A. from the Department of the History of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, Ankara-Turkey and a PhD from the Oriental Institute, Moscow. She worked at the Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage, Cairo as a Project Manager, researching and documenting Cairo’s 19th- and early 20th-century presidential palaces. She has also documented the early Islamic Papyrus collection and the Persian illuminated and illustrated collections at the Egyptian National Library (Dar el Kotub) and worked on the pigment analysis of early miniatures there.