Mizna (; lit. âÂÂcloudâÂÂ) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota, that supports Arab and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) writers, artists, and filmmakers through publishing and public programming. Its principal programs include the literary journal Mizna: SWANA Literature + Art and the annual Twin Cities Arab Film Festival.
Its journal has received national recognition, including a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize in 2023 and a CLMP Firecracker Award for general excellence in magazines in 2021. In 2021, Mizna was also named a âÂÂRegional Cultural Treasureâ through a Ford and McKnight Foundation initiative supporting Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American-led arts organizations in Minnesota.
Mizna began in 1996 as a community newsletter associated with the Minnesota chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). Arts Midwest later described Kathryn Haddad and Saleh AbudayyehâÂÂwho went on to found MiznaâÂÂas volunteers with ADCâÂÂs Minnesota chapter who assembled a newsletter that drew a high volume of submissions. By 1998, Mizna had incorporated as a literary journal co-edited by Haddad and Abudayyeh, and it published its first issue in January 1999.
In the 2000s, Mizna expanded beyond print publishing into public cultural programming in the Twin Cities. Minnesota Public Radio covered Mizna early in its history as a platform for Arab American writing and arts, and later reporting described its growth into a broader arts organization supporting artists across disciplines.
In 2003, Mizna launched the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival (TCAFF) to showcase contemporary cinema by Arab and SWANA filmmakers, including filmmakers from the diaspora.
In 2019, Mizna co-presented the visual arts exhibition History Is Not Here: Art and the Arab Imaginary with the Minnesota Museum of American Art. The exhibition was curated by Heba Y. Amin and Maymanah Farhat and was on view from September 12, 2019 through January 5, 2020. Mizna received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for this exhibition.
The first issue of Mizna: SWANA Literature + Art was published in January 1999. A biannual publication, Mizna has published 38 issues over 21 years as of 2021.
Over the years, more than 400 writers have been published in Mizna. Contributors include Suheir Hammad, Mahmoud Darwish, Eileen Myles, Naomi Shihab Nye, Laila Lalami, Hisham Matar, Abdifatah Shafat, Sahar Mustafah, Najla Said, Ismail Khalidi, Matthew Shenoda, Zeyn Joukhadar, Ramla Bile, Hazem Fahmy, Joe Kadi, Khaled Mattawa, Robert Farid Karimi, Zeina Hashem Beck, and Omar Sakr.
In 2019, Mizna celebrated its 20-year anniversary and published a special issue titled "Twenty Years" that included many authors who had been published in the first year of publication.
In 2021, Mizna won the CLMP Firecracker Award for Magazines.
Mizna's Twin Cities Arab Film Festival (TCAFF) launched in 2003, with the aim of showcasing the contemporary cinema of the Arab and Arab diasporic world's emerging, independent, and established filmmakers. A major goal of the TCAFF is to provide a space for films that reflect the Arab and Arab American community in all its complexity, not in the simplistic, stereotyped ways they are often represented in mainstream Western film and media. Each year, the TCAFF screens curated narrative and documentary features and a selection of curated short films. Mizna has presented many first screenings of films in Minnesota via TCAFF, and occasionally U.S. premieres. The film festival format includes post-viewing audience discussions led by invited film artists. From 2005 to 2013, the festival was held at The Heights theatre in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. Since 2014, it has been held at St Anthony Main Theater in Minneapolis in collaboration with the Minneapolis St. Paul Film Society. In December 2020, Mizna presented the first fully online Arab Film Fest Collab (AFFC) in collaboration with the Arab American National Museum (AANM), the Arab Film and Media Institute (AFMI), and ArteEast.
Mizna was named a Regional Cultural Treasure in 2021 by the Ford Foundation and McKnight Foundation and has received several cultural awards, including multiple Knight Arts Challenge Awards, the Ordway's Sally Award for Social Impact (2018), and Best Nonprofit in City Pages<nowiki/>'s Best of the Twin Cities (2020). Mizna's funders and supporters include the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, McKnight Foundation, St. Paul Cultural STAR Program, National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, Center for Arab American Philanthropy, National Network for Arab American Communities, and Knight Foundation.