Biography
I am a scholar of contemporary visual culture who specializes in film, video, and digital media, particularly Arab moving-image practices, documentary and Global South cinema, and activist engagements with colonialism and its legacies in contemporary art and film.
My writing has appeared in both scholarly and general-audience publications, including 4 Columns, Art in America, Feminist Media Histories, Frieze, Ibraaz, Journal of Visual Culture, The New Inquiry, Screen, Third Text, and World Records. I am also co-editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017), an anthology of essays by artists, curators, and scholars on artists’ activism, boycott campaigns, (self-)censorship, and transnational solidarity.
Currently, I am working on a book on Palestinian moving-image art, tentatively titled Portals to Palestine. The manuscript posits a model of bearing witness as a decolonial process of worldmaking and world repair in which artists refract the unjust conditions of the present and reconstruct unrealized political potential from the past to animate visions of emergent rights and resurgent communities.
Prior to joining Cambridge, I taught at Brown University, RISD, SVA, and the American University of Beirut (AUB). I received a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University (2022), an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from SVA (2012) and a BA in Comparative Literature from NYU (2008).
Publications
Edited Volumes
Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017), co-edited with Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
“Rehearsing Emergence: Practicing Worlds Beyond the Imperial Archive in the Works of Onyeka Igwe and Mahasen Nasser-Eldin,” Screen, forthcoming.
“Striking Cultural Erasure: A Conversation on Boycott in Contemporary Art,” co-authored with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, in The Borders of Art: Migration, Mobility, and Artistic Practice (Eds. Dina Ramadan and Sarah Rogers), Bloomsbury, forthcoming.
“Palestinian Dreams in an Untimely Present: Imagination and Solidarity in Mohamad Malas’ Al-Manam,” co-authored with Noureldin Ahmed, in Cinemas of Global Solidarity (Eds. Matthew Croombs and Masha Salazkina), Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
“Virtual Returns: Rehearsing and Remediating Palestinian Return in Contemporary Video Practices,” in Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media (Eds. Dina Matar and Helga Tawil-Souri), Bloomsbury/IB Taurus, 2024, pp. 79-94.
“Recovering Histories of Solidarity and Struggle with Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti,” World Records Vol. 8 (Summer 2023): https://worldrecordsjournal.org/recovering-histories-of-struggle-and-solidarity-with-kristine-khouri-and-rasha-salti/
“Narrating Looted and Living Palestinian Archives: Reparative Fabulation in Azza El-Hassan’s Kings and Extras,” Feminist Media Histories Vol. 8, Issue 2 (Spring 2022), pp. 43-69.
“Witnessing the Worldly within the Imperial Commons,” World Records Vol. 4 (Fall 2020): https://worldrecordsjournal.org/our-violent-commons-witnessing-the-worldly-within-the-imperial-commons/
“Lawrence Abu Hamdan,” 4 Columns (September 2019): https://4columns.org/estefan-kareem/lawrence-abu-hamdan
“Introduction: Boycotts as Openings,” in Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (Eds. Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni, Laura Raicovich), OR Books, 2017, pp. 11-18.
“Extending Co-Resistance: An Interview with Eyal Weizman,” in Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (Eds. Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni, Laura Raicovich), OR Books, 2017, pp. 101-112.
“Exhibit A: How A Team of Artists, Architects, and Theorists Are Exposing State Violence,” Frieze Issue 177 (March 2016): https://www.frieze.com/article/exhibit
“A Cute Idea: Ryan Trecartin’s Videos…,” The New Inquiry, 7 February 2014: https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cute-idea/
