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.

I curated a program of short films by Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019), a Lebanese filmmaker who dedicated a large part of her career to struggles for self-determination in places like Palestine, Western Sahara, and Kurdistan.

The films were screened at Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, California, on March 10, 2024, and were followed by a discussion that I moderated.

Between 1974 and 1982, Saab made a dozen films centered around Palestinians during the Lebanese civil conflict including women resistance fighters, the situation in refugee camps, and Israeli invasions of Southern Lebanon. Moving between a journalistic approach and an essayistic, personal style, Saab captured moments that were central to the experience of Palestinians in Lebanon, notably the 1982 siege of Beirut, the departure of the fedayeen from Lebanon, and the exile of Arafat and other PLO leaders aboard the Greek cruise ship Atlantis.

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.