Fouzia Saeed facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Fouzia Saeed
Fouzia Saeed opening a Manganhaar Festival
Born	Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Nationality	Pakistani
Occupation	Director General, Pakistan National Council of the Arts Former Executive Director, Lok Virsa, Pakistan National Institute for Folk and Traditional Heritage
Known for	Author of TABOO: The Hidden Culture of a ...

Fouzia Saeed is a Pakistani social activist, gender expert, trainer/facilitator, development manager, folk culture promoter, television commentator, and author.

..... Her work on violence against women spans over 20 years and includes founding Bedari, the first women’s crisis center in Pakistan in 1991. .....

On 10 March 2009, the Pakistan People's Party Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gilani, named Saeed to a three-year term as one of the 15 members of the National Commission on the Status of Women. .....

In February 2015, the Pakistan Muslim League prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, appointed Saeed as the executive director of Lok Virsa, the National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage. She completed her term on 9 February 2018 with exuberant accolades from the press and civil society for her stellar success in revitalizing Lok Virsa and expanding the space for performance culture in Pakistan.

In January 2020, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Prime Minister, Imran Khan, appointed Saeed as the Director General of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA).

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In July 2021, while on a road expedition for PNCA to central Balochistan to identify young artistic talent, Saeed suffered serious injuries in a road accident. By July 2022, she had begun to reengage in Pakistani society. A women's group produced a short video in June 2022 enumerating her manycontributions to the advancement of Pakistani women. As of August 2023, she lives in the USA where she continues to recover.

Saeed says of herself: "I want to be judged by my abilities, my struggles and my achievements and not labeled or stereotyped by my gender, my economic background, my nationality or my beliefs."

Personal profile

Saeed received most of her schooling and early college education in Peshawar, Pakistan, where she graduated from the University of Peshawar with a BS in Home Economics as the University Gold Medallist for Academic Excellence in 1979. As a result of her academic achievements, she received a Quaid-e-Azam Overseas Educational Award and spent 8 years at the University of Minnesota, where she earned an MS in design and a doctorate in education. She received additional funding from the Ethel L. Parker International Fellowship Award of the American Home Economics Association for her doctoral research. Saeed returned to her native Pakistan immediately after completing her degrees, but has returned to Minneapolis on several occasions as a visiting lecturer and to receive a Distinguished International Alumni Award in 1998 and the International Leadership Award in 2008, both presented by the University of Minnesota in recognition of her contributions to the field of education and the women’s movement in Pakistan.

The government of Japan named Saeed as one of seven Asian Leadership Fellows for 2010. She attended the Fellowship program in Tokyo from September to November 2010 and gave lectures at numerous Japanese universities and wrote about her experiences on her return.

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She served as the director of Mehergarh: A Center for Learning where she headed its programs on youth, gender and human rights from 2004 until 2012. She remains an informal advisor.

Between September 2012 and February 2015, Saeed was a Fellow at the US National Endowment for Democracy (DC), Draper-Hills Fellow at Stanford University (California), Visiting Fellow at George Mason University (Virginia) and Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (DC) under the Smithsonian Institution.

She currently lives in Islamabad, Pakistan with her husband, whom she met in 1995 when they were both working in the United Nations in Pakistan. They have also lived together in Manila, Kabul, and Cairo. She is one of the very few Pakistani women of her generation who has learned how to SCUBA dive and has dived in Pakistan, the Bahamas, the Mergui Archipelago of Burma, Fiji, and various islands of the Philippines.

Literary Output

She is the author of several well-regarded books. ..... In 2012, she published Forgotten Faces: Daring Women of Pakistan’s Folk Theatre (National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage, 2011), a heavily illustrated book based on her field research on the dying art form of travelling theaters of Punjab in the late 1980s. While the Executive Director of the Lok Virsa, she conceived and edited a substantial coffee table book with text and 500 photographs, Folk Heritage of Pakistan: Glimpses into a Cultural Diversity (Lok Virsa, 2018) Her next book, On Their Own Terms: Early 21st Century Women's Movements in Pakistan(Oxford University Press, 2020) is based primarily on field research she did in Pakistan. The book covers four case studies of Pakistani women's efforts to regain their rights. The book also provides an introduction to the academic concept of women's individual and collective agency based on literary research conducted while she was a Fellow at the Wilson Center. Her latest book appeared after her accident. Tapestry: Strands of Women's Struggles in the History of Pakistan (Lightstone Publishers, Karachi, 2021). Research for Tapestry was conducted in Pakistan and the US Library of Congress while a Fellow at the Wilson Center. Tapestry provides a deep background to the modern cases covered in On Their Own Terms by chronicling the stages of women's political development throughout the history of Pakistan.

Areas of work

Women in folk culture

Fouzia Saeed has been working throughout her career on women's issues in the field of folklore, development and social change. Her career started as a Deputy Director Research at the Pakistan National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage ( Lok Virsa Museum ) where she developed and supervised a folklore research program and contributed to improvement of the folklore archives and the library of the institute. She conducted research on various aspects of folklore, through the Institute and on her own. Her first research was on women in folk theatre in 1991. Recently, Lok Virsa requested her to update and enhance the book, which they published in 2011 as 'Forgotten Faces: Daring Women of the Pakistani Folk Theatre'. In the book, she chronicled the life of Bali Jatti, the first women to own a travelling stage theatre in Punjab, as a vehicle to capture the tradition of Punjabi folk theatre through the eyes of the female performers whose careers are spent in front of audiences of men who keep their wives hidden at home. The first review of the book,(Documenting Arts by Sarwat Ali) appreciated her ability to present these stage stars as real women who faced more than their share of troubles in their lives. She has also done research on other entertainment forms like folk circus, folk dances and folk natak (drama), and has mostly focused on women’s experiences in each of them.

..... Saeed used this culture as a mirror for Pakistanis to assess their own gender relations. For this reason, the book became a cult classic among young English-speaking Pakistanis. The book was published in English and Urdu by Oxford University Press and has been translated into Hindi and Marathi by nonprofit groups in India. A Japanese translation was published by Commons in October 2010.

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Saeed has been actively involved in reviving Pakistani folk performance arts through organisations she has been associated with, and is also a folk dancer herself. Together with the Folklore Society of Pakistan she helped to re-establish the Manganhar folk singing genre that had almost died out in Pakistan.

Media

Saeed has been associated with electronic media since 1977 when she was among the first female television news announcers on Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) from Peshawar. She was a college student at the time. After completing her studies in the US, when she returned to Pakistan in 1987, she started her engagement with PTV again. This was through conducting programs for PTV and later with other television channels from time to time.

She hosted four different television series of talk shows on social and cultural issues: Hum Qadam, Bholi hui hun dastan, New Horizons and Rishtay (about 50 programs in total). In addition, she has hosted numerous live transmissions and special programs onvarious occasions.

She continues to appear on PTV and other channels as a commentator on political and social issues.

In October 2009, her last television program began on anti-Talibanization called Ye Kon Log Hen? (Who Are These People?). The program ran for three months. This program was a part of her larger agenda addressing the ways terrorists establish themselves in fragile communities. She organised a large gathering of citizens at the National Library on 23 June 2009 to map out a strategy for countering talibanisation in Pakistan. In 2010, she galvanized citizen support for a constitutional amendment formalizing local government as a third tier of the state administration as a part of her counter narrative agenda. She continues to broaden her counter narrative through her work at Lok Virsa.