Pam Totah is a Palestinian ceramic artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spins her Palestinian ancestry and its stories into the clay, drawing inspiration from tatreez, a classical Palestinian embroidery art form that threads stories of place, identity, and cultural history into the cloth it adorns.

Growing up as a child of immigrants in the U.S. she was integrated into and inspired by her Palestinian culture. She was and is heavily influenced by her creative mother who filled their home with items from Palestine, and by her contractor father who taught her to envision, build, and create beautiful things with precision. Strands of both the artistic and functional.

After being shaped by her professional years as a teacher and, later, work managing international development projects abroad, Pam initially turned to ceramics as a place to ground and find peace away from her career. She found her idealism challenged with the reality of how international projects and settings, in some cases, reinforced cultures of outsider dominance and modern imperialism, and the clay provided a means to channel much of that frustration, a place to be in relationship with something physical, and an opportunity to solve challenges of a different nature. 

She began finding ways to integrate her daily struggles into the clay, transforming her ceramics practice from a self-care outlet into a focused artistic and devotional practice, a conduit for broader themes of expression.  

As her practice deepened, the Palestinian culture she was raised in quickly found its way into the clay. Beginning with carefully crafted patterns of tatreez, Pam embarked on the continuous refinement of integrating these centuries-old patterns. Motifs from her mother’s drawers of embroidery, pillow cases, and thobes all have found their way into Pam’s functional and fine art ceramic pieces, each telling a tiny portion of the bigger sewn story they come from.

Palestinian heritage has become a clear focus throughout her work, to honor the cultural traditions that are even now being taken, commodified, uprooted from their meaning and context. Integration of the story of her ancestry into her art has become a way to claim space for herself, and for the existence of the rich history and people of Palestine.