Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has been actively engaged in culture and the arts within the UAE since the inception of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority in 2008; where she began her career in the public sector. Working her way up within the organization, Sheikha Latifa has been instrumental in the inception of numerous key initiatives that have cemented Dubai Culture’s position as the authoritative voice of culture and the arts in Dubai, heralding the onset of the future of the creative industry.

As an artist herself, Sheikha Latifa’s passion lies at the intersection of culture, creativity, technology, innovation and design. From her post as Chairperson of Dubai Culture & Arts Authority, she employs this paradigm to play a key role in enriching these industries while ensuring their cross-incubation.

Throughout her work, Sheikha Latifa endeavours to envision the future of the cultural industry while keeping a keen eye on the past and all its treasured stories, to cultivate a pioneering and sustainable creative ecosystem. This in turn aims to fulfil the vision of her father, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to position Dubai as an international cultural centre while promoting its development into a city of happy, creative, and empowered people.

With an astute insight honed by her father and the unbridled ambition and vision passed down from him, Sheikha Latifa aspires to position Dubai as a beacon of cultural actuation, in the region and the world. Among her many ambitions for Dubai is to invigorate the city’s creative economy and to foster an environment of cultural production and innovation as an intrinsic part of everyday life.

With people at the heart of her vision, Sheikha Latifa is at the forefront of Dubai’s key socio-cultural initiatives today. These collectively contribute to the steady growth of the UAE’s cultural ecosystem and infrastructure and their integration across Dubai’s other key sectors.

Under her patronage and guidance, Dubai Culture has launched its flagship Dubai Art Season, an umbrella initiative that aims to provide creatives within the city and the wider region equal opportunities to showcase their work, hone their skills, and establish their crafts at different stages of their professional development. The Dubai Art Season includes Art Dubai, the leading international art fair in the region; SIKKA Art Fair, an artist-led initiative of fully commissioned works; the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, and several other programmes. Sheikha Latifa has also extended her patronage to Dubai Design Week, the largest creative festival in the region concerning design.

Through her role as Vice Chairman of the Emirates Literature Foundation, the organizer of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, she advocates the advancement of literature and strives to sustain a culture of reading. Most recently, she launched several initiatives to renovate and modernise Dubai’s Public Libraries, aiming to transform them into havens of lifelong learning, collaboration and creativity.

Sheikha Latifa’s vision for Dubai’s creative economy is built upon the belief that the culture of progress and innovation is driven by the ideas of its people. To enable this, she has been at the helm of initiatives such as Creatopia, an online platform for attracting and supporting talented creative entrepreneurs, as well as promoting occupational training, community service, and graduate consultancy programs.

Sheikha Latifa holds an Executive MBA with Honours and a graduate degree in Business Sciences specialised in Marketing from Zayed University, and has participated in numerous leadership training programmes, beginning with the Mohammed bin Rashid Leadership Development Program. From there, she interned at Dubai Holding before joining the newly incepted Dubai Culture and Arts Authority at the time.