The Courage to Want with Donia Wael

A few minutes into my conversation with Donia Wael, I tell her I can see a glow-up is happening, with a big smile across my face.

It is not just that the clothes have changed, although they have. There are formal dresses now, stronger silhouettes, even new editorial shoots. She admits she has been developing a more deliberate relationship with styling recently. She tells me that she has always had an instinct for image, but lately she seems interested in what an image can say.

“There are so many things I want to express now, not only through the music, but through how I dress,” she tells me. “It’s the first thing people see.”

We pause on that idea, letting it sit there for a while in our shared awareness. Being seen.

It seems that at this exact moment and transition, fashion is slowly becoming another language in her creative toolbox. Before someone hears what she has to say, there is already the body, the fabric placed that is placed over it, the decision of what to reveal or highlight or hide.

With eyes lit bright, she talks animatedly about jewellery, belts, styling and the childlike joy she has recently found in dressing up. Fashion has always been something that hovered somewhere in her vicinity. As a child, she remembers searching for the unusual T-shirt, and people repeatedly suggested modelling because of her height, but she had never considered it part of the work. It stayed in her subconscious, and it had not really resurfaced. Until now.

This is an interesting moment to catch her at, because Donia has actually built the first part of her career almost entirely around the opposite impulse. She wanted to be heard before she wanted to be seen.

As a child, she was so shy about singing that she would not perform even for her family. Born in Alexandria before moving between Cairo and time with her grandmother in Qalyubia, Donia studied pharmacy while knowing that music was where she wanted to go. Her father bought her her first keyboard while she was still at school. Eventually, after finishing her degree, she returned fully to art.

When her music began finding its way to people, her instinct toward remaining concealed stayed firmly put. And so it was. Her voice travelled ahead of her image. Even her face was obscured in her early artworks. The point was the song, not the person attached to it. If she could not tell someone what she was feeling, she could write it.

“I didn’t speak a lot,” she says. “I could write you a song, but I couldn’t talk to you about it.” That was the first iteration of Donia’s language.

In 2021 and 2022, songs like “El 3asal” and “Bekya,” followed by her collaborative EP with El Waili. “Taree2 Tweel” established a world that swam in colloquial Egyptian writing, heartbreak and small, peculiar metaphors – all suspended over electronic production. “El 3asal” became the breakout, its audience eventually climbing into the millions. Her voice had arrived. And it had arrived carrying so much melancholy. Sadness and longing. Love after rupture. These feelings belonged to the stage she was experiencing and her music became a way to externalize an internal world without having to be at the centre of it.

Then, almost suddenly, Donia took a liking to acting. “I started acting because I wanted to write better and express my emotions better,” she says. “I knew I wrote a lot, but there were so many emotions I didn’t understand. I thought acting would make me write better songs, sing better, perform better – understand my emotions so I could express them more clearly.”

Then she fell in love with it. Acting arrived publicly through Rivo and later Dawa’y El Safar, but its more important effect was private. It forced Donia into her body. It required presence and going inwards. Instead of standing outside an emotion long enough to turn it into a song, she had to inhabit it.

More importantly, she had to inhabit people who were not her. “It’s you, but under different circumstances,” she says. “You experience yourself in completely different ways – different emotions, different things you would say, different things you would do.”

By then, the lines between her practices were beginning to dissolve. Midterm allowed music and acting to operate and coalesce inside the same world. Donia played Malak while contributing songs including “Yaretna,” “3al 3ady,” “Ded El Kon” and “Khalas.” The character could lead her toward the song rather than Donia always having to begin with it herself.

Somewhere within that expansion, she also came back into herself. Her 2025 EP Bifkrny Beek moved through a spiral of heartbreak and healing across “Mafish,” “Moshkela,” “Shams W Amar” and “Ezay.”

Around the same period, she finally formed the all women live band she had been dreaming of since school. The concept of collaboration began replacing some of the solitude that had defined her earlier process.

She calls it seeing through “different eyes.” This practice widened the emotional vocabulary available to her. To build a character, Donia reads, researches and tries to understand why somebody behaves as they do rather than standing outside the behaviour and judging it. Eventually that same curiosity began pointing back towards her. A character could expose a pattern in someone she knew, then a pattern in herself. So she found herself in an ongoing cycle of confrontations and acceptance.

She especially felt this in her role as Malak in the Egyptian series Midterm.

Malak avoids. And when situations become emotionally difficult, her instinct is to leave them rather than remain inside the discomfort. Donia eventually recognized something in herself in that response.

The lesson she took from the character was almost its inverse. Stand still. “You’re going to see yourself,” she says. “You’re going to work on yourself. Yes, you can fall a little bit, but you’re still strong.”

And the emotions themselves started changing. I tell Donia I can hear it. The emotional range feels wider now. There is sadness, but it no longer occupies the entire room. There is flirtation. Pleasure. Curiosity. Desire.

“Before, I wanted to be heard. Now I want to be heard and seen,” she says.

Then she pushes the thought a little further. People tend to associate vulnerability with revealing pain, she says, but there are other kinds of exposure. “Showing love, or showing that you like someone, that’s even more vulnerable.”

To want something openly can be more exposing than grieving something you have lost. That difference sits underneath her recent solo single “Feek Haga.” After years in which longing pointed backward – toward absence, heartbreak and what remained after something ended – the song feels lighter, flirtier and more immediate. The direction of the desire has changed.

Donia is no longer only describing what happened to her. She is becoming comfortable saying what she wants. There is particular exposure in that for a woman. It can feel easier to make virtue out of needing less. We are taught to sacrifice and accommodate, wait and accept. Wanting requires a different posture. It asks you to believe that your desire deserves to take up space before anybody agrees to fulfil it.

Donia laughs when I tell her she is owning her desire. “Exactly,” she says. “Being seen is actually really vulnerable.” She speaks openly about how much she used to doubt herself, how quickly anxiety could move her attention into futures that had not happened. One sentence she encountered while working on a film stayed with her: “I wasted so much time worrying about what could go wrong, but what did go wrong was never the things I worried about.”

The practice now is presence. She notices small things she once dismissed in herself. She is calmer and more grateful. She says she speaks less and listens better. She observes more closely. “I feel like my senses are better,” she says. “I observe more. I feel more. I hear more.”

And then, “The more I see, the less I know.” Perhaps that is why learning keeps appearing wherever Donia goes. Music led her toward vocal training. Then songwriting took her toward acting. Acting opened psychology, embodiment and character. Now fashion is pulling her toward another field she wants to study properly rather than merely wear.

When I point out the pattern, she stops. “I love that you’re saying that,” she says. “You’re making me realise what I am.”

She begins assembling it aloud live. Music, then acting and now fashion. Art forms that initially appeared to sit beside one another suddenly look less separate. Each has taught her another method of expression; each has brought her closer to something she has been trying to articulate since childhood.

“I always wanted to explore art in all its forms,” she says. “I’m discovering that with you now.” Perhaps the destination is not singer, actress or fashion figure, but an artist who operates somewhere in the space between them. Donia already talks about music intersecting with runways, musicals, performance and image. She does not yet know exactly what that becomes.

For once, uncertainty does not seem to frighten her. “I’m going to dream big now,” she says. “I want to create things that no one knew existed.”

She lists them freely. A musical, a runway, fashion, collaborations, becoming an ambassador for something she actually believes in. She wants to learn. She wants to build. She wants scale.

“I used to have a lot of self-doubt,” she says. “Now I’m manifesting and praying for it.”

There is something circular in where that leaves her. Donia Wael began by hiding the face so the feeling could survive on its own. She wanted somebody, somewhere, to hear a song and recognize themselves inside it. Then acting placed her inside other people. Fashion brought attention back to her own body. The music widened and the feelings widened with it.

The spiral returns to the same place, but never as the same person. “I want to touch people’s hearts,” Donia says. “I want to make them feel seen. Like I want to be seen, I want them to be seen.” Years ago, the shy girl behind the song needed the voice because she could not say the thing directly. Now she is standing inside it.

 

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