ArteEast Team

Ginou Choueiri, Executive Director

Ginou Choueiri is a Lebanese born interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and curator. Her artistic research, she looks at how complex and often conflicting histories can be reinterpreted, and alternative futures imagined through new forms of storytelling. Her creative documentary film “Rhythm of Forgetting” premiered at DocLisboa, and won several awards such as the Goldsmiths Warden’s prize, special jury mention at DokuBaku, and Best Director Award at Beirut Women’s International Film Festival. She has exhibited her work internationally, such as Contemporary Art Center of Barcelona (Spain), Merz Foundation (Italy), and Williamsburg Art Center (USA).. She completed an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths University in London was 2022 fellow at UnionDocs Collaborative Studio (NY). She currently lives in New York.

Lila Nazemian, Programs and Communications Director

Lila Nazemian (she/her) is an independent curator and the Special Projects Curator at ArteEast in New York. In 2023, she joined the Brooklyn-based Transmitter gallery as a co-director. Her research and curatorial practice are focused on reimagining approaches to histories from the Middle East/Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) and Central Asia regions in an effort to counter narrative revisionism and collective amnesia. Recent curatorial projects include: Now That We Have Established a Common Ground, as part of Protocinema’s Emerging Curator Series at and in partnership with the Clemente, New York (2022); A Few In Many Places in New York, Protocinema, Governors Island New York, (2021); I open my eyes and see myself under a tree laden with fruit that I cannot name, Center for Book Arts, New York (2020). Nazemian teaches part-time at NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Art & Art Professions. She received a B.A. in History from Scripps College, California; and an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from N.Y.U., New York. She was a QAYYEM 2019 Curatorial Fellow, was among the inaugural participants of the 2018-2019 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York and participated in ICI’s 2018 Curatorial Intensive in Bangkok.

Shayma Aziz, NNAAC Fellow

Shayma Aziz is a New York-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work centralises and rethinks the feminine diasporic body, its representation in mythology and its multifaceted existence in the modern world. Born in Asyut, Egypt, Aziz’s artistic approach is informed by her study of ancient Egyptian art, film and international contemporary practices. She obtained her BFA in painting from Luxor University, where she investigated representational formats in ancient Egyptian art before she moved to Cairo and actively engaged in its growing art and independent film scene for well over a decade. She obtained her MFA in Studio Art at the City College of New York where she currently lives. Aziz works on decolonising materials like oil paints in her painting work and experiments with stop-motion animation in her multi-media and storytelling work using native materials from her homeland across North Africa. Embarking on new artistic formats, Aziz is currently exploring Egyptian percussive instruments and narration performance.

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