Karin Chien

Karin Chien is a producer, educator and distributor committed to championing independent voices. Karin is the recipient of the inaugural Cinereach Producers Award, the Independent Spirit Producer’s Award and the producer of 10 independent feature-length films. Her films have won over 100 festival awards, premiered at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals, been nominated for 4 Independent Spirit Awards and received distribution in over 20 countries. Karin is the founder/president of dGenerate Films, the leading distributor of independent cinema from mainland China. Karin is the co-creator of the Cinema on the Edge screening series, celebrating the best of contemporary Chinese cinema. Karin is the co-founder of i love 2, a production company specializing in socially conscious, short-format content. Karin has consulted for the Sundance Institute, The New York Times, Film Independent, Independent Television Service (ITVS), and Cinereach.
Karin is on the Advisory Board for ArteArchive.

Yasmin Desouki

Yasmin Desouki is a film archivist and programmer with years of film research, archiving, and curatorial experience in Egypt and the US. She graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where she focused on cinema studies and moving image archiving and preservation, and furthered her studies on film restoration practices through the International Federation of Film Archives’ (FIAF) summer School. She previously worked as the artistic director at Cimatheque-Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, Egypt from 2013-2019, and prior to that worked as the archive manager at Misr International Films. She has since moved back to the US, and is currently the manager of film collections at the Chicago Film Archives

Kay Dickinson

Kay Dickinson teaches Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (BFI Publishing, 2016) and Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (Palgrave, 2018). More recently, she co-edited The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2020) with Donatella Della Ratta and Sune Haugbolle. Over the years, she has contributed in various ways to a number of festivals dedicated to Arab cinema, in the region, as well as in Europe and North America. She is currently an active member of the Regards palestiniens and Regards syriens screening collectives.

Coline Houssais

Coline Houssais is a researcher, curator, writer and translator whose
work focuses on culture from the Arab World as well as on the
cultural history of Arab migration in Europe.

Peter Limbrick

Peter Limbrick is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media. He is the author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: the Films of Moumen Smihi (University of California Press, 2020) and of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave, 2010). He has published articles in Framework, Visual Anthropology, Third Text, Screening the Past, Camera Obscura, and Journal of Visual Culture as well as edited anthologies.

Prof. Limbrick’s first book, Making Settler Cinemas, studies the material and cultural relations of cinema and settler coloniality in the three sites of his title, all of which are embedded in British imperial history and marked by their own distinctive settler colonial politics. His book reveals the ways in which the modes of film production, distribution, reception, and representation in and between those settler societies construct a transnational politics of settler-indigenous encounter. But his book also reveals the possibilities for resisting and reconfiguring those colonial histories through the ongoing work of film archives, indigenous exhibition and guardianship, and even in the labor of film history itself.

Prof. Limbrick’s recent work is on Arab film and video and extends his interest in cinema in colonial and postcolonial environments. His book Arab Modernism as World Cinema, on the Moroccan director Moumen Smihi, a central figure in the New Arab Cinema that took hold in the Maghreb (Northern Africa) in the early 1970s, will be published by the University of California Press in spring, 2020 (an essay from this project has been published in a special issue of the journal Third Text.) As part of this project, he has curated a retrospective of Smihi’s work which has shown at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the Block Cinema, Chicago, and the Tate Modern (UK). With Omnia El-Shakry, he organized the symposium Unfixed Itineraries: Film and Visual Culture from Arab Worlds at UCSC in 2013. He has published two essays on the Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, and continues to research on experimental film and video from North Africa, Syria, and Lebanon.

A related aspect of his research is the relationship between discourses of colonialism, globalization, and sexuality, especially queer or non-normative constructions of gender and sexuality in transnational cinemas.

Livia Alexander

Livia Alexander is a curator, writer, and Chair of the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University. Her work is focused on examining the relationship between art infrastructure and artistic production, urbanity, cultural politics of food and art, and contemporary art from the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Her numerous art and film programs, exhibitions and events, include: Embedded, Embedding: Artist Residencies, Urban Placemaking and Social Practice (commissioned by Residency Unlimited, in collaboration with The New School/Parsons, NYC); Customs Made: Quotidian Rituals and Everyday Practices (Maraya Arts Cenre, Sharjah, UAE); Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema (MoMA, New York; Abu Dhabi Film Festival, Tate Modern, London); and CinemaEast Film Series. Alexander is co-producer of the research-based interactive documentary, Jerusalem, We Are Here(Canada/Palestine/Israel, 2016), directed by Dorit Naaman.

Her award-winning scholarly writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Anthropology, Framework, MERIP, and as book chapters and catalog essays. She regularly contributes to Hyeprallergic and Harpers Bazaar Art Arabia and founded the online publication ArteEast Quarterly. She is the editor of a year-long series commissioned by the online platform www.ArtsEveryehere.com centered on artist residencies at the nexus of urban placemaking and social practice.

Alexander served as an advisor to a variety of art organizations and galleries, including Tirana Open, Residency Unlimited, Sapar Contemporary, Al Riwaq Art Space, New Rochelle BID, Asian Contemporary Art Week, and the Art & Patronage Summit. She is the co-founder of ArteEast, a non-profit organization established in 2003 to support and promote artists from the Middle East, North Africa and its diasporas, which she directed until 2013.

Dr. Alexander holds a Ph.D. from New York University in Cinema and Middle East Studies and teaches art criticism and theory, visual culture and professional practice at Montclair State University.

Lena Diab

Lena Diab is an art collector and currently runs My Pick LLC, a New York-based company that identifies and promotes emerging labels in the ready-to-wear and fashion accessories space.  Born and raised in Nazareth, Lena is a graduate of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Lena moved to the United States in 1994 and has lived in Washington, London and York City where she currently lives with her husband, Salah Saabneh, and her two children, Amir and Yara. Lena is an art enthusiast and collects art from around the world.

Karim Mostafa

An Egyptian-American philanthropist who is a doctoral candidate in Reading, Writing, and Literacy at University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. While working to complete his dissertation on the interplay of text and image in Arabic and Arab-American children’s picture books, he has been assisting in teaching a course at Penn on Multicultural Issues in Education for three years. Prior to pursuing his doctorate, Karim worked in New York City for nine years as a journalist and an elementary public school teacher. From 1997 – 2002, Karim reported on the online newspaper industry as Associate Editor of Editor & Publisher Online, the online edition of Editor & Publisher magazine. From 2002-2006, he was a New York City Teaching Fellow, requiring him to teach grades 4-6 in Spanish Harlem and to complete a Masters in Elementary Education at Hunter College in 2004. For his undergraduate degree, Karim studied Near Eastern Languages & Civilization, focusing on medieval Islamic thought, at the University of Chicago (1995). Since 2006, Karim has been an active board member participating in the management of Nimos Engineering & Agricultural Development Co., (Cairo, Egypt), while studying at University of Pennsylvania. As an Egyptian-American who has lived in both Egypt and North America, each for 20 years, Karim now divides his time between residences in Cairo and New York City.

Katherine Precht

Katherine Precht is a development professional currently at Friends Seminary and previously at the American University in Cairo who brings professional experience to support ArteEast development efforts.

Ellen Brooks Shehata

Ellen Brooks Shehata is the Investment Lead for the Innovative Finance Practice at IRC’s Airbel Impact Lab, building a portfolio of projects to realign capital behind humanitarian objectives. She has over a decade of expertise working in the Middle East in finance, investment advisory, fundraising, and policy and served as a Vice President in JPMorgan’s Private Banking division from 2014-2019. Prior to that, she was living and working Cairo, Egypt, at the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt on economic and investment policy. Ellen holds a B.A. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles; and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs: International Finance, Middle Eastern Studies. She served on the ArteEast Board from 2016-2022; as its President from 2017-2020.