Hissa Alsuwaidi

Hissa Khalil Alsuwaidi is a Qatari media professional, businesswoman, cultural consultant and writer. She invested her experience and creative abilities in cultural consultancy through KON and in writing through her book ‘Human Clay’, bringing media, business, poetry, theatre and culture together across one varied career.

She is a wife and the mother of two sons, roles that remained part of the same demanding life she built across media, business and culture.

She grew up within a line of determined women. Her mother and grandmother each confronted the constraints of her own time, and her aunts provided further examples of struggle and perseverance. From them she inherited ambition, resolve and an unwillingness to compromise her principles. Her mother was among the relatively few Qatari women of her generation able to complete secondary and university study at home and abroad. The daughter carried forward her independence, adventurousness and readiness to enter unfamiliar fields, eventually bringing her experience and creative abilities together through KON Consultancy and the literary work ‘Human Clay’.

Her mother was one of no more than a handful of women working in the petroleum sector at Shell before it became Qatar Petroleum. At a time when most women remained at home and society was not accustomed to women who were economically independent and publicly influential, that career demanded persistence and considerable sacrifice.

Because her mother’s working hours often conflicted with those of her only daughter, she spent substantial time at the workplace and among her mother’s colleagues. The experience helped her acquire English through practice and taught her to communicate without undue reserve. She became sociable, self-confident and at ease with people, while the bond with her mother grew still closer through the changing circumstances of later childhood.

Despite her professional success, her mother eventually left the career she had hoped to build so that she could devote more time to her daughter and two sons. She moved into teaching, choosing to sacrifice personal ambition for the family. Witnessing both the pride and the pain within that decision gave her daughter an enduring sense of responsibility towards her.

The move did not end her mother’s insistence on independence. She continued petitioning the government until she secured a home, becoming one of the first recipients, and obtained a driving licence when these were rarely granted to Qatari women. Her daughter watched her meet social resistance with determination, while also discovering that another part of Qatari society welcomed legitimate female ambition. Her mother ensured that those confrontations did not harm the children or deflect the course of their lives.

Those examples formed the daughter’s own compass. Although her mother provided everything she needed and gave her a comfortable life, she did not become dependent. She preferred self-reliance, initiative and careful use of every opportunity, following the same path of productive independence.

After graduating from Qatar University in English, she entered teaching and immediately found a field in which she could innovate. During her first year, her methods drew praise from educational specialists, and one supervisor’s recognition encouraged further experimentation. Her work became known within the Ministry of Education, and she was selected among teachers whose exemplary methods were shared with colleagues, despite her relative newness to the profession.

When the developed-schools initiative emerged, she joined its pioneers and contributed to curriculum development and the establishment of advanced schools. She later became Director of the Private Office of Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, a position she held for five years. The responsibility transformed her professional life and gave her the confidence of a leader who recognised abilities that had not yet been fully used. Cultural events, poetry evenings and activities in Qatar and abroad also allowed her to build a strong media network and establish a visible name in cultural and creative circles. A further five years at Qtel, before its transition to Ooredoo, opened the fields of communications, media and training and brought offers from several organisations.

Media attention eventually encouraged a formal move into broadcasting. She spent four years at Al Rayyan Television, whose heritage orientation made the work especially engaging. Once she had accumulated substantial administrative experience and was satisfied with her public-media career, she resigned. The decision allowed her to control her own direction and invest those years of experience in media and training.

Before leaving broadcasting, she established KON Consultancy and placed within it the accumulated knowledge of her earlier roles. The company gave her room to correct past errors, launch initiatives and pursue projects without institutional restrictions. Her work earned recognition across media, culture and business, leading to invitations to represent Qatar in international forums, attend senior meetings and provide consultancy.

The route was not straightforward. Rejection from a master’s programme was a serious disappointment, but she used it as an incentive to continue creating and proving herself. She also encountered administrative systems in some media organisations that she regarded as resistant to innovation and marked by personalisation, unfair competition and forms of administrative corruption. Hurtful and frustrating experiences sometimes turned the workplace into a field of conflict. They changed her outlook and influenced later decisions, while providing lessons she applied to the management of her own company.

Writing began early, when she recorded in verse whatever she experienced and felt. Theatre later drew her towards playwriting: she started with puppet theatre, then wrote for adults under the supervision of the Tunisian director and writer Boukather Doma. In 2021, she published her first book, ‘Human Clay’, a collection of twenty-five years of human experience expressed through articles close to social literature. The work brings text, creative imagination and visual art together, allowing artists from different schools to interpret each article through their own vision and giving both word and image new dimensions.

The resulting artworks reflected the varied stages, emotions and opinions of a life lived across many fields. Those experiences and obstacles also formed an open, outgoing character able to understand opposing views and deal objectively with people and situations, however wide the difference.