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 on contemporary art and cultural activism has appeared in both scholarly and general-audience publications, including 4 Columns, Art in America, Artforum, BOMB, Feminist Media Histories, Frieze, Ibraaz, Journal of Visual Culture, The New Inquiry, The New York Times T Magazine, 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 project on contemporary Palestinian art and cinema, which emerges from my PhD dissertation, “Witnessing as Worldbuilding: Practicing Decolonization in Palestinian Moving Images,” completed at Brown University in 2022 with support from a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and a Darat al-Funun Dissertation Fellowship. The manuscript posits a model of bearing witness as a decolonial process of worldbuilding 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, the American University of Beirut (AUB), the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and the School of Visual Arts (SVA). I completed an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing at SVA (2012) and a BA in Comparative Literature from New York University (2008).
