Khadija El Bennaoui is a cultural practitioner with more than eighteen years of experience in the arts and culture sectors. With roots in theatre performance and an ongoing practice as a producer and curator, she is committed to working with artists to improve the conditions for their creativity to flourish. As a consultant, Khadija has contributed her expertise in cultural cooperation, grant-making, cultural policy research and program design to missions led by EUNIC, the Ford Foundation, the European Cultural Foundation, Mimeta, Med Culture, UNESCO, the European Commission and more. Through these various missions, she has worked to strengthen South-South networks and cooperation, imagine and implement new, sustainable models of funding, and support the vibrancy of independent arts spaces and networks. An important strand of Khadija's career has been devoted to improving the conditions for artists' mobility, in particular within the Global South. In 2005, she launched Art Moves Africa, the first mobility fund devoted to artists and cultural operators travelling within Africa. As administrator from 2005, she successfully facilitated hundreds of travel projects and advocated widely for the importance of strengthening mobility in Africa. At the same time, she played a key role in the development of the Young Arab Theatre Fund (now Mophradat), convening and managing four major symposia for members of independent arts and culture spaces in the Arab world. Khadija is the author of the chapter "Surviving the paradoxes of mobility," which was commissioned as part of the 2018 Global Report monitoring the implementation of the 2005 UNESCO Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. She holds a B.A. in Arabic studies from Ibnou Zohr University (Morocco), a B.A. in cultural management from Hassan II University (Morocco) and a European Diploma in cultural management from the Marcel Hicter Foundation (Brussels).