Rama Duwaji is having a busy fall.

There she was in the front row at the runway show for Diotima during New York Fashion Week, sitting near the Instagram executive Eva Chen, the fashion designer Willy Chavarria and the model and activist Bethann Hardison.

She had illustrations published in a feature article in New York magazine about the objects that Palestinians took from their homes when they fled Gaza.

Over Labor Day weekend, as a singer crooned in Farsi and an oud player strummed gently, she sat on a bench in the backyard of a bar in Williamsburg, at a fund-raiser for mutual aid groups in Sudan. Some of her prints were for sale on a table inside the bar. One, in black and white, showed two women, standing defiantly, with their arms interlocked and their backs pressed against each other.

What Ms. Duwaji, 28, has not been doing this summer and fall, is stumping for her husband.

The little-known state assemblyman whom Ms. Duwaji matched with on Hinge in 2021 — when she was living the kind of young artist’s life, as a freelance animator and illustrator, that she envisioned when she moved to New York after college — is now very well known, as Zohran Mamdani.

And Ms. Duwaji is getting used to what her brand-new husband running for mayor in a highly publicized race means for her, and their life together.

In June, after Mr. Mamdani stunned Mr. Cuomo in the Democratic primary, Ms. Duwaji was onstage beside her husband during his victory speech, smiling in a boatneck dress and a “Zohran NYC” pin. In the days after his victory, Ms. Duwaji gained more than a 100,000 new followers on Instagram, many of whom commented that they were intrigued by her “cool” style and artistic endeavors.

“She’s our modern day Princess Diana,” said Hasnain Bhatti, 32, a photographer and friend.

She has declined all press after the primary — including an interview for this article, explaining that the attention is new to her — as her husband pushes toward the general election. Mr. Mamdani’s campaign declined to comment on her decision not to participate in public election events, or on what her role might be should he win.

Several of her close friends describe this moment for her as exciting but overwhelming, and very far from what she imagined she might be caught up in when she first moved to New York City in 2021.

Ms. Duwaji does speak publicly on her own platforms. In August, after Israeli strikes killed Anas al-Sharif, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in Gaza who was 28, she posted an animation on Instagram of a metal chain encircling a quotation: “I urge you to not let chains silence you or borders hold you back,” flashing to a Palestinian flag with the words “end the genocide.”

“I believe everyone has a responsibility to speak out against injustice, and art has such an ability to spread it,” Ms. Duwaji said in an interview in April with Yung, a magazine based in the Middle East and Africa. Many of her designs express concern for humanitarian crises in Gaza, Sudan and Lebanon and portray intimate scenes of Middle Eastern life.

But so far, she has not participated in the kind of campaign press that the spouses of candidates often do, keeping herself out of the traditional political spotlight during her husband’s sudden ascent. She attends art events and leads ceramics workshops around the city. Of the many questions she may have to answer if Mr. Mamdani prevails next month, the biggest one could be: Can she keep that up?

Chirlane McCray, the most recent first lady of New York City, had been married to her then-husband Bill de Blasio for two decades when he was first elected Mayor of New York. Ms. McCray, who is also an artist, served as the city’s first lady for eight years.

She has not met Ms. Duwaji, but said that while there are expectations and obligations that come with the role, “times have changed.”

“I think that there’s more acceptance now that a spouse can define their level of visibility,” Ms. McCray said.

From Texas to Dubai to N.Y.C.

Growing up, Ms. Duwaji frequently got in trouble in class for doodling in textbooks and notebooks. Born in Houston, Ms. Duwaji, who is of Syrian descent, moved to Dubai when she was about 9 years old. Drawing, she has told interviewers over the years, was her solace.

“Time goes by really quickly when I draw,” she said in a podcast interview in 2020.

Her father, a software developer, and her mother, a doctor, were supportive of her love of art, though they also encouraged her to be practical when it came to choosing a career. During her last few months in high school in Dubai, she decided to pursue art as a career.

She chose to attend Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar for her freshman year of college. But then Ms. Duwaji moved to Richmond, Va., the main V.C.U. campus, to complete her undergraduate studies.

There, she realized the ways in which she didn’t “fit in as well” as a Syrian, she said in a podcast interview in 2019. “I started making work about identity, what it means to be Syrian abroad and kind of just delved into these topics that meant a lot to me.”

Ms. Duwaji graduated in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in communication arts. After graduating, she lived with her family in Dubai and participated in various artist residencies, including in Beirut and in Paris.

When she moved to New York in 2021 to pursue art, she soon developed a relationship with Mr. Mamdani, whose friends have shared that he was “so giddy” about her early on in their relationship, and that Ms. Duwaji naturally fit into their group. Several friends of his even confessed to liking her more than Zohran.

Once a Brooklyn resident, she and Mr. Mamdani now live in Astoria near Steinway Street, a hot spot for Arab cuisine and culture where hookah shops and restaurants line the block.

In conversations with half a dozen people who know Ms. Duwaji from the close knit worlds of Muslim-American artists and creators in New York, her friends painted a picture of a relatively new New Yorker who still always manages to know what gallery exhibits in Williamsburg and Greenpoint to go to or where to get the best shawarma.

Her favorite? Al-Sham Restaurant in Bay Ridge.

‘Her Own Line’

In the animation, a pair of hands massages kale, chops pecans and peels a carrot. It is narrated by a woman reminiscing about growing up in Egypt and observing how expressive the women in her family were with their hands when they cooked.

It’s part of a work of art called “Sahtain!” — an Arabic expression similar to “bon appétit” — which was Ms. Duwaji’s master’s thesis, about the communal act of making and sharing a dish.

In 2024, Ms. Duwaji graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a master of fine arts in illustration as visual essay. Riccardo Vecchio, the chair of Ms. Duwaji’s master’s program who also taught her in Painting II, remembered his former student as “very focused on her work.”

Initial classes, which were lecture based, were about opening up ideas and perspectives around painting to those who have been underrepresented in the Western art canon, and it was a topic that seemed to resonate with Ms. Duwaji, he said.

When asked if she turned in her homework on time, Mr. Vecchio laughed.

“I think she was a little behind schedule, but, ultimately, it all came together at the end,” he said. “Everything got done.”

After receiving her master’s degree, she participated in an artists’ residency in the Catskills. Ms. Duwaji was one of 24 artists selected from a pool of over 500 applicants.

“She’s got her own line,” said Steven Weinberg, an author and illustrator who hosted the event. “Some artists you can see even a stick figure and know who did it.”

On Oct. 21, 2024, Mr. Mamdani posted a photo of Ms. Duwaji, smiling, on Instagram, with the caption “Light of my life. ????” and the hashtag #hardlaunch. On Oct. 23, 2024 he hard launched something else: his mayoral campaign.

His new fiancée was largely able to continue to make art in privacy during the early days of the campaign, but in the spring, some critics raised questions about whether he was “hiding” her.

In response, Mr. Mamdani posted more photos of Ms. Duwaji on Instagram, this time of their courthouse wedding. The pair of them on the subway, Ms. Duwaji in white with a vintage coat, holding flowers, and both of them at City Hall.

He shared that he and Ms. Duwaji had married in February, three months before, and she was thrust into the public eye. In July, the couple also held a wedding celebration in Uganda, where Mr. Mamdani was born. Some friends from New York made the trip to join the festivities. The one stipulation — no phones.

The Campaign Homestretch

In August, while her husband continued to rack up small campaign donations, Ms. Duwaji was in the Catskill Mountains, hosting a tile workshop that invited participants to paint a set of four ceramic tiles inspired by native Syrian flora.

At the retreat, Ms. Duwaji introduced herself to Rowan Spencer, who wore a shirt depicting Irish and Palestinian solidarity. They spoke about their Irish and Syrian roots — Mr. Spencer’s family is from Cork, Ireland, and Ms. Duwaji encouraged him to take pride in his heritage — and their “experiences growing up between the States and these homelands which have been torn up by war and conflict,” he said.

“She makes you feel really comfortable,” said Mr. Spencer, a founder of a pop-up restaurant called Mon Petit Canard that provided the music and food for the retreat.

Mr. Spencer, 36, added that “she also was dressed fantastically the whole time,” and frequently wore her “big, beautiful boots” that weren’t necessarily the most suitable for camping in the woods.

Those boots are a signature part of Ms. Duwaji’s style, which friends say is an important part of how she expresses herself.

Ms. Duwaji’s wardrobe also includes lots of eye-catching vintage pieces, stacked gold jewelry, one shoulder tops and flowy midi skirts.

Rachel Scott, the founder of Diotima, was the one who invited Ms. Duwaji to her fashion show last month. “I was intrigued by her work and personal style, so having her at the show was really exciting,” Ms. Scott said.

That fashion week front-row seat was one of her many outings in the election homestretch, though she has remained off anything officially resembling a campaign trail.

If her husband wins in November, Ms. Duwaji would hold a position that has been sparsely filled in the last five decades.

“We don’t really have a history of first ladies in modern day New York,” said Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University. Michael Bloomberg and Ed Koch, who both served for 12 years, were unmarried, as is Eric Adams.

“There isn’t a template for this role,” Ms. Greer said, adding that there is more leeway for Ms. Duwaji to forge her own path out of the public eye in a city with a high tolerance for nontraditional first ladies.

That may be a change even from 11 years ago, when Ms. McCray became the city’s first lady.

“I don’t think people realize how much there is to navigate,” Ms. McCray said.

Whatever happens, should Ms. Duwaji find herself as first lady of New York, just four years after moving to New York as an aspiring artist, Ms. McCray believes she has an advantage.

“Fortunately, her youth will give her more energy,” Ms. McCray said. “Which is helpful because it is the city that never sleeps.”