Dr Kareem Estefan

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).