Lebanese-French Rima Abdul Malak was appointed as the Minister of Culture in France by the French Prime Minister-designate Elizabeth Bourne.

Before this appointment, Abdul Malak served as an advisor to the French President Emmanuel Macron since 2019. Previously, she served as the French Cultural Attaché in the United States, from 2014 to 2018.

Abdul Malak gained in recent years the label of “the other minister of Culture” for her achievements in the sector, overshadowing the official minister Roselyne Bachelot by implementing several important cultural projects during her period as an advisor.

Among those projects is her contribution in 2020 towards alleviating the growing resentment in the cultural sector as a result of the Corona pandemic.

She was able to do so by listening to the art workers’ demands and concerns in a video call that President Macron attended. Rima Abdul Malak was born in 1987 in a small town in Mount Lebanon, called Shikan where she was raised until the age of 10, before relocating with her parents to Lyon, France.

She completed her studies in France, graduating from the Lyon Institute for Political Studies in 1999. She then pursued a Master’s Degree at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

 Once again, Lebanese women are making waves in countries abroad, acknowledge their remarkable capabilities and even their full rights.

Abdul Malak is not the first Lebanese woman in the diaspora to take a position of power, as noticeable in Canada, for instance, with the Lebanese-Canadian scientist Mona Nemer, Chief Science Advisor to PM Justin Trudeau.