Toni Maraini (born in Tokyo in 1941) is a poet, writer, art historian and anthropologist, as well as a specialist in North African literature. She lived in Morocco from 1964 to 1986, where she contributed to the emergence of a post-colonial artistic avant-garde. Thoroughly involved with artists at the Casablanca school of fine arts, she was one of the first people to teach art history in Morocco. She plays an active part in magazines such as Souffles, and in other publications she has helped to found, such as Maghreb Art and Integral, which have helped to reinforce the links between artists in the pan-Arab world, especially in the 1970s. As an emblematic figure in a Mediterranean and cosmopolitan modernity, she is still at work on a cross-cultural œuvre, where poetic experimentation and art studies intersect. Among her numerous works illustrating this ‘science’, which is as heterodox as it is militant, we should mention Écrits sur l’art (2014), Dernier thé à Marrakech (1994) and La Lettre de Bénarès (2007).