July 2025

As a guest of the Samar reading series, a SWANA-&-friends literary series, I read excerpt of a new essay at the Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco.

May 2025

This episode of Uncovering Roots follows not just a moment in history, but a personal search for meaning. For Filmmaker Raed Rafei, uncovering Pasolini’s visit to Beirut became a way to explore memory, loss, and the traces of a city that no longer exists. Through letters, archives, and conversations, the episode pieces together a story that links the past to questions we’re still asking today, about queerness, solidarity, and what it means to remember.

November 2024

Tripoli / A Tale of Three Cities, my new feature documentary, will have its world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam (IDFA), the world’s largest documentary film festival, in November 2024.

Read about the film in this article by The Hollywood Reporter where the film’s trailer is revealed.

August 2024

Read here this blog post published by the New Review of Film & Television Studies, a quarterly peer-reviewed journal of media studies ahead of the publication of my article, “Queer (In)Visibility and the Production of Queer Space in Postwar Lebanese Film,” scheduled to be included in their issue 23.3 in 2025.

Summer 2024

Read “The Reawakening of the Belly Dancer and Queer Revolution,” a chapter in the peer-reviewed book, Queer Contemporary Art of Southwest Asia North Africa, edited by Anne Marie Butler and Sascha Crasnowis and with a foreword by Gayatri Gopinath.

The book presents new perspectives on queer visual culture in the Southwest Asia North Africa region from queer artists as well as scholars who work on queer themes and is available for pre-order here.

July 2024

The Mizna Cinema Issue is available for pre-order here.

Read my newly published essay, “Hometown: Reflections on a Film Project in the Making,” in the Cinema Issue of Mizna, a biannual print literary and art journal and a digital platform for literary and multidisciplinary work reflecting critically on the current realities of the SWANA region and beyond.

March 2024

I participated in a roundtable discussion at the University of Southern California (USC) on the politics of cinematic friendships between Pedro Almodóvar and queer Arab filmmakers following a screening of Nadir Moknèche’s Lola Pater (2017). This event took place at the Ray Stark Family Theatre on March 28, 2024.

December 2023

In this episode of the Orfalea Center Thematic Research Cluster podcast (University of California, Santa Barbara), Dr. Raed Rafei tells us about how his experiences as a filmmaker and journalist have impacted his scholarship and vis versa. We spoke about his work in Lebanon, his PhD journey in the U.S. and the ways in which these myriad life experiences shape the directions which our scholarship takes. More specifically, Dr. Rafei shares with us interesting lens from which to think through queerness and upheaval in Lebanon and the MENA region more widely through film, and well as what the region itself can teach us about queerness. Additionally, Dr. Rafei reflects about Israel’s current bombardment of Gaza and the ways in which activists, artists, and scholars in and from the region have dealt with Israel’s policies of pink washing.

March 2023

Eccomi … Eccoti discussed in Viola Shafik’s new book, Resistance, Dissidence, Revolution: Documentary Film Esthetics in the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge Studies in Middle East Film and Media, 2023).

“The film’s entire rhythm is based on shifting times and atmospheres; the spatial coming and going between Lebanon and Italy, outdoors and interiors, He and Me.” (p. 238)

November 2022

As part of the 26th Arab Film Festival (San Francisco/ Bay Area), I moderated a panel discussion featuring a group of Arab filmmakers called, Arab + Queer + Film: Between here and there.

I also carried out discussions with Mohammad Shawky Hassan, director of Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day, Corine Shawi (director) & Halim Sabbagh (editor) of Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist, and Eliane Raheb (director) & Miguel Jelelaty (character) of Miguel’s War.

All the discussions are available online here.

October 2022

After a screening of Al-Atlal (The Ruins) with other short experimental films as part of the 12th annual Festival of (In)Appropriation, I was in conversation with filmmakers TT Takemoto, Darren Wallace, and Misael José Oquendo in a discussion moderated by curator Allyson Unzicker and held at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

April 2022

I was awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2022, a program that supports advanced graduate students in the last year of Ph.D. dissertation writing to help them complete projects in the humanities and interpretive social sciences that will form the foundations of their scholarly careers. Since its launch in 2006, the program supported more than 1,000 promising emerging scholars with both research fellowships and professional development programming. The final cohort of Dissertation Completion Fellows was named in 2022.

November 2021

I was featured on the Queer Arabs Podcast, a growing collection of dialogues surrounding the intersection of Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian + North African and LGBTQ identities.