Laila Al-Qatami has extensive experience in management and strategic communications for cultural organizations, non-profit associations, financial institutions, corporations, and governments. Currently, she is the Chief Communications Officer for Al Ahli Bank of Kuwait. Previously, she was the Managing Director for the Sheikh Abdullah Al Salem Cultural Centre (ASCC) in Kuwait, one of the largest cultural complexes in the world.

She also directed external relations and corporate social responsibility for Gulf Bank – Kuwait; directed communications and operations for the Executive Office in the Diwan of HH The Prime Minister of Kuwait; and headed marketing and outreach for the National Center for Documentation and Research of the UAE Ministry of Presidential Affairs.

When Laila was based in Washington, DC, she was the spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and a regular commentator for domestic and international media discussing Arabs and Muslims.

Laila is a founding board member of Soroptimist Kuwait, a licensed Kuwaiti NGO and chapter of a worldwide service organization for women and girls, most recently serving as its Vice President. She was a member of the National Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the largest civil rights organization in the US (2006–2012), and was a mentor for Georgetown University students in the Patrick Healy Fellows Program (2006–2009).

She has a B.S. from the University of Colorado, an M.A. from Georgetown University, and is a certified Sustainability practitioner.

Wanis El Kabbaj is a globally-minded marketing professional with dual French-Moroccan citizenship. Having grown up in a family fond of literature and around books by Amin Maalouf, Taha Hussein, and Naguib Mahfouz, he developed a deep appreciation for powerful storytelling, which drove him to deliver two TED Talks on the future of urban transportation and the ambivalent relationship between nationalisms and globalization that garnered 6 million views worldwide. Wanis champions equitable environments, fostering collaboration and driving positive change.

Philip Grant is a Persian-English and French-English translator based in Los Angeles. He has worked as an academic anthropologist and sociologist at the University of Edinburgh and the University of California, Irvine, as well as a non-profit researcher in philosophy of technology, and in investment management. He is co-author of Chains of Finance (OUP, 2017), and is currently working on a history of the Zanj Rebellion. An article on silk cloth in the Zanj Rebellion will be coming out in al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā.

Deborah Kapchan is a writer, translator, ethnographer and a professor of Performance Studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (1996), Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (2007), as well as other works on sound, narrative and poetics. She translated and edited a volume entitled Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry (2020), which was shortlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award for Poetry.

Talal al-Muhanna is a film producer and cultural manager. Through his creative label Linked Productions, he has produced award-winning documentary and fiction films by Arab filmmakers. As Senior Producer at Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Cultural Centre in Kuwait, Talal produced multimedia performances with a wide variety of international artists from 2017–2022.

Talal’s films have been supported by Sundance Institute, Tribeca Film Institute and Cinereach (USA); Hot Docs Blue Ice Group Fund (Canada); British Film Institute (UK); Visions Sud Est (Switzerland); Arab Fund for Arts & Culture (Lebanon); and Enjaaz (UAE). These films were selected at numerous festivals and broadcast in Europe, the Americas, and MENA.

The ITVS documentary “Whose Country?” – which he co-wrote – won Best in Journalism at the BBC Arabic Film Festival. Talal holds a BA and MA in Film & Moving Image Production from Leeds Beckett University. In 2015, he was a Producing Fellow at the Center for Asian American Media and, in 2020, received British Council Kuwait’s Professional Achievement Award for his work as a media producer.

Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait and spent the first six years of her life in London, Edinburgh, and St. Louis, Missouri. She holds a PhD in English literature from Brown University and is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Kuwait University. Her academic research focuses on cultural politics in the Middle East, with a special emphasis on gender, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonial issues.

Her short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. It won the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award. Her debut novel, An Unlasting Home—published by Mariner Books in the US and Saqi in the UK—comes out in paperback in April 2023.

Her short fiction and essays have appeared in various publications, including Ninth Letter, The First Line, After the Pause, World Literature Today, and the BBC World Service. She lives in Kuwait.

Terence Ward is a writer, producer, and cultural consultant who grew up in Arabia and Iran before attending the American University of Cairo and the University of California at Berkeley. Based in Athens for 10 years, he advised governments and industries across the Gulf with MEIRC.

His memoir Searching for Hassan: A Journey to the Heart of Iran was published in seven languages, including two Persian editions. His other books are: The Wahhabi Code: How the Saudis Spread Extremism Globally and The Guardian of Mercy: How an Extraordinary Painting by Caravaggio Changed an Ordinary Life.

He’s appeared on CNN with Christiane Amanpour, PBS, C-SPAN, BBC, RAI-TV, while his writing has been published by the LA Times, Huffington Post, CNN, The Ecologist, Il Manifesto, La Stampa, and Reset. His award-winning docs include: “Black Africa White Marble” and “Talk Radio Tehran.” Ward lives in Florence and serves as an ambassador for Religions for Peace, the world’s largest inter-faith organization.

AMMIEL ALCALAY — Poet, novelist, translator, scholar, and activist Ammiel Alcalay was born and raised in Boston. He studied Latin and ancient Greek at City College in New York and earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from the CUNY Graduate Center.

His parents were Sephardic Jews from Belgrade (Serbia), and much of Alcalay’s work engages questions of religious identity, language, and culture, particularly the histories and cultures of the Balkans and the Middle East. He is the author of the classic study *After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture*; *Keys to the Garden*; *Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays*; and *the cairo notebooks* [sic], among other works.

Alcalay founded and is general editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. The chapbook series publishes student- and guest-edited archival texts of writers and activists, frequently focusing on correspondence, journals, lectures, and ephemera. Alcalay won the American Book Award for his work on Lost & Found in 2017.

KAI BIRD — is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist. In January 2017, he was appointed Executive Director and Distinguished Lecturer of CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography.

His most recent book, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, was a New York Times best-seller. He chronicled his childhood in the Middle East in his memoir, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis — which was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

He is the acclaimed author of biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and William Bundy. He won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006 for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin). His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA.

Bird and Sherwin also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History. In September 2016, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Carleton College. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.

Kai Bird lives in New York City and Florida with his wife, Susan Goldmark. His new book, due out in the summer of 2021, is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. @Kaibird123

NATHALIE HANDAL was raised in Latin America, France, and the Middle East, and educated in the United States, United Kingdom, and Asia.

Her recent poetry books include Life in A Country Album, winner of the 2020 Palestine Book Award and finalist for the Foreword Book Award; the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers,” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía and The Invisible Star; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award.

She is the editor of two anthologies, and her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, The Africa Institute, among others.

She is professor of literature and creative writing at New York University, and writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine.

RANA KAZKAZ is an award-winning filmmaker. With a focus on Syrian stories, her portfolio includes Mare Nostrum (2016), which has been selected in over 100 international film festivals and won more than 30 awards; the documentary Searching for the Translator (2016); Ham (2013); Deaf Day (2011); Exquisite Corpse (2009); and Kemo Sabe (2007).

Her first feature, The Translator (2021), won several grants and development awards including the Arte Award at L’Atelier de la Cinefondation at the Cannes Film Festival (2017), the CNC Award at Meetings on the Bridge at the Istanbul Film Festival (2017), and a Tribeca Alumni Grant (2018).

Her current film projects include Honest Politics and The Foolishness of God: My Forgiveness Journey with Desmond Tutu. She is an assistant professor of communication in residence at Northwestern Qatar, where she teaches narrative filmmaking.

ANNE-MARIE O’CONNOR — is the author of The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the bestselling story of the battle by Vienna émigré Maria Altmann to reclaim five Gustav Klimt paintings from her native Austria in an eight-year legal battle. The saga also inspired the movie Woman in Gold, in which Helen Mirren played Maria Altmann.

A former Jerusalem correspondent, Anne-Marie is a longtime journalist in Latin America and covered the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador as a Central America bureau chief for Reuters. She was also a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, UPI, and the Cox Newspaper chain, and has written for *Esquire*, the *Christian Science Monitor*, and *The Nation*.

She is a speaker on the subject of the Nazi plunder of art and restitution. Her Twitter handle is @theladyingold.

VIOLA SHAFIK — is a filmmaker, curator, and film scholar. She is the author of *Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity* (AUC Press, 1998/2016), *Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation* (AUC Press, 2007), *Resistance, Dissidence, Revolution: Documentary Film Aesthetics in the Middle East and North Africa* (forthcoming from Routledge, 2023), and the editor of *Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa* (AUC Press, 2022).

She has taught at the American University in Cairo, Zurich University, Humboldt University, and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where she held the position of researcher from 2016 to 2020. She served as Head of Studies for the Documentary Campus MENA and as a curator and consultant for numerous international film festivals and film funds, such as La Biennale di Venezia, the Berlinale, Dubai Film Market, Rawi Screenwriters Lab, Torino Film Lab, and the World Cinema Fund.

She directed several documentaries, among them *The Lemon Tree/Shajarat al-laymun* (1993), *Planting of Girls/Mawsim zaraa al-banat* (1999), *Jannat `Ali–Ali im Paradies/My Name is Not Ali* (2011), and *Arij – Scent of Revolution* (2014). Current works in progress include *Home Movie on Location* and *Der Gott in Stücken*.

Viola Shafik is the guest editor of TMR’s BERLIN issue.

ELLA SHOHAT — is Professor of Cultural Studies at NYU. Her books include *Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices*; *Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation*; *Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age*; *Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives*; *Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora*; and, with Robert Stam, *Unthinking Eurocentrism*; *Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media*; *Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism*; and *Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic*.

She co-edited several special issues of *Social Text*, including “Edward Said: A Memorial Issue,” “Palestine in a Transnational Context,” and “911—A Public Emergency?” Her writing has been translated into over 10 languages.

Shohat has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including *Social Text*, *Middle East Critique*, *Meridians*, *Interventions*, and the *Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication*. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she also taught at the School of Criticism and Theory.

Together with Sinan Antoon, she was awarded an NYU Humanities Initiative Fellowship for their project “Narrating Iraq: Between Nation and Diaspora.” She also received a Fulbright Research/Lectureship at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, to study cultural intersections between the Middle East and Latin America.

Her most recent books include *On the Arab-Jew, Palestine and Other Displacements* and *Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora*.

Ella Shohat is from a Jewish-Baghdadi family, grew up in Israel, and has lived most of her life in New York.

AMY WILENTZ — Amy Wilentz is the author of *Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti*, *The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier*, the novel *Martyrs’ Crossing*, and *I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger*.

She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. In 1990, she was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction for *The Rainy Season*. She won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for memoir for *Farewell, Fred Voodoo*, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in general nonfiction in 2020.

Wilentz is a MacDowell fellow, the former Jerusalem correspondent for *The New Yorker*, and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation. She has written for *The New York Times*, *The Washington Post*, *The Los Angeles Times*, *Politico*, *The London Review of Books*, *Los Angeles Review of Books*, and many other publications.

She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine and lives in Los Angeles. She tweets @amywilentz.

Professor Mehnaz M. Afridi is the Director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College in the Bronx, where she teaches contemporary Islam and the Holocaust.

She is the author of the 2017 title *Shoah Through Muslim Eyes*, and previously taught Judaism and Islam at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Originally from Pakistan and raised in Europe and the Middle East, she brings a multicultural perspective to Islam.

Her deep interest in Judaism and the modern Jewish diaspora has led her to numerous interfaith conferences and invitations by non-Muslims to expound on the intellectual and theological similarities between Jews and Muslims.

Her recent research projects are focused in Italy, exploring Muslims and Jews in Italian culture. She taught in Rome and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to attend a seminar in Venice, Italy.

Read an article about Mehnaz’s “Ask a Muslim” lecture series. She once presented her talk, *An Illuminated History of Jewish-Muslim Relations*, at Levantine Cultural Center.

Dr. Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is a contributing editor at the Daily Beast. Reza Aslan has degrees in Religions from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He serves on the board of directors for both the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues, Abraham’s Vision, an interfaith peace organization, and PEN USA, as well as The Markaz/Levantine Cultural Center’s national advisory board.

Aslan’s first book is the New York Times bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been translated into thirteen languages, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award in the UK, and nominated for a PEN USA award for research Non-Fiction. His most recent book is How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, followed by an edited anthology, Words Without Borders: Writings from the Middle East, which will be published by Norton in 2010. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Slate, Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Nation, and others, and has appeared on Meet The Press, Hardball, The Daily Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Colbert Report, and Nightline.

Aslan is Cofounder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, the first ever motion picture company focused entirely on entertainment about the Greater Middle East and its Diaspora communities, as well as Editorial Executive of Mecca.com. Born in Iran, Reza Aslan has been a frequent guest on The Daily Show and many other cable news stations. His many books and edited anthologies are important contributions to the dialogue about Islam and the West, and US–Iran relations. He is now the Wallerstein Professor at Drew University’s Center on Religion, Culture, and Conflict in New Jersey.

Sami Shalom Chetrit is a dissident Israeli poet, educator, filmmaker and historian whose latest book The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel: 1948-2003, has been translated into Arabic by Samir Ayash and published by Madar (Ramallah). Chetrit received his Ph.D in 2001 from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Political Science, writing on Mizrahi politics in Israel. He received a Master of International Affairs in 1991 from Columbia University, with a specialization in Middle Eastern studies. He was born in 1960 in Morocco and grew up in an immigrant working class neighborhood in the port city of Ashdod. His published poetry includes Poems in Ashdodians, poems from 1982–2002 (Andalus, 2003). Several of his poems appear in English translation in the anthology Keys to the Garden (City Lights 1999), edited by Ammiel Alcalay. In 2003 he co-produced and directed with Eli Hamo (cinematography and editing) the documentary film “The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak.” His new documentary is “Come Mother” on his mother’s generation of Moroccan women in Israel.

Peter Cole is the winner of a 2007 MacArthur Award. He is a translator, publisher, and poet who brings the often overlooked works of medieval Spain and the modern Middle East to English-speaking audiences. His highly regarded translations of the poetry of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Shmuel HaNagid, two of the great Hebrew poets of the Andalusian “Golden Age,” offer readers a lyrical illustration of the extraordinary Arab-Jewish cultural partnership that flourished in tenth- through twelfth-century Spain.

A poet himself, Cole’s translations infuse medieval verse with contemporary meaning while remaining faithful to the original text. His renderings of HaNagid’s poems in particular, long regarded as “untranslatable,” retain the subtleties, complexities, and formal elegance of the original verse. Underlying Cole’s translations is an implicit message of cultural and historical cross-fertilization that is also evident in his work as a poet and a publisher. His Ibis Editions publishes little-known works translated from Arabic, Hebrew, German, French, and Ladino, enlightening English-speaking audiences to the thriving literary tradition of the Levant. By fostering literary dialogue in and about the Middle East, Ibis provides an occasion for intellectual and cultural collaboration. In a region mired in conflict, Cole’s dedication to the literature of the Levant offers a unique and inspiring vision of the cultural, religious, and linguistic interactions that were and are possible among the peoples of the Middle East.

Peter Cole began his undergraduate studies at Williams College (1975–1977) and received a B.A. (1980) from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, Rift (1989) and Hymns & Qualms (1998), and has also published many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic, including Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (1996), Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol (2001), Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971–2005 (2006), and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (2007). He is the co-editor of Ibis Editions, which he co-founded in 1998, and has been a visiting writer and professor at Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, and Yale University’s Whitney Center for the Humanities in the fall of 2006.

Among Cole’s translations from contemporary Hebrew and Arabic poetry and fiction are also Love & Selected Poems of Aharon Shabtai (Sheep Meadow), J’Accuse, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions), So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971–2005 by Taha Muhammad Ali (Copper Canyon Press), The Collected Poems of Avraham Ben Yitzhak (Ibis), and The Shunra and the Schemetterling, by Yoel Hoffmann (New Directions).

Cole has received numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 1998 Modern Language Association Translation Award. J’Accuse received the 2004 PEN-America Award for Poetry in Translation.

Dorit Cypis is an award winning artist, educator and mediator. Her work has been presented internationally at museums and other cultural contexts. Foreign Exchanges, an initiative since 2007, offers conflict engagement and diversity skills through mediation and aesthetics. Dorit is Founding Member, Mediators Beyond Borders and past Chair/MBB Middle East Initiative; she founded Kulture Klub Collaborative, artists working with homeless youth to bridge survival and inspiration; directed FAR, Foundation for Art Resources, partnering with private and public organizations to support cultural production in urban settings by artists. On Policing, a current project, weaves her strengths to design community development events in vulnerable neighborhoods where local youth and police officers engage through collaborative and interdependent efforts. Dorit was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in 2014 and has taught throughout USA, Canada, Israel, Holland and France. She earned a Masters of Fine Art, California Institute for the Arts, and Masters of Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University.

Nile Regina El Wardani, MPH, MPhil, Ph.D. currently lectures at CSUSM.edu, UCSD.edu and SDSU.edu in Global Public Health. Previously she taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt in the Graduate School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. A multi-cultural person, Nile speaks English, French, Arabic and Spanish. She holds a PhD and MPhil from the University of London in Public Policy and a Master in Public Health from UCLA.

She has worked for over 25 years in Africa, the Middle East and USA as a program manager/business developer in the fields of public health and international development. She specializes in public health education, human rights, reproductive health and women’s empowerment. She was awarded the Middle East Award for Social Science Research for her research on policy, governance, human rights, and civil society. Nile has consulted for UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO, and the Egyptian Ministries of Health, Education and Information. She has worked with bilateral donors including USAID, Finnida, Danida and Dutch Aid and many NGOs in the ME and Africa.

In the cultural realm, Nile has produced for the Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe Music Festival, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Carnegie Hall as well as venues in Paris and Cairo. Dedicated to improving lives and bridging gaps between people, Nile produced the world’s first pediatric AIDS benefit at Carnegie Hall in 1989 that was televised on NBC. A visionary, Nile subsequently developed the indigenous Egyptian production of Sesame Street (Alam Simsim) with a focus on nutrition, safety and hygiene.

In media, she co-hosted/produced Radio Intifada (for five years) a weekly one-hour radio show covering the politics and culture of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) on Pacifica Radio 90.7 FM (Los Angeles). She currently serves on the UCLA School of Public Health Alumni Board of Directors and the Advisory Board of Levantine Cultural Center which champions a greater understanding of the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region by presenting cultural and educational programs that bridge political and religious divides. She continues to cover culture, travel and design for Obelisque Magazine (Cairo, Egypt) and blogs at www.nileelwardani.org.

Bana Hilal was born and raised in Beirut, where she received her B.A. from the American University of Beirut. She also has an Interior Designer Degree from the Newport Beach Interior Designer Institute, and has worked in real estate property management. Bana is a community activist who has long committed herself to humanitarian issues that involve empowering women and assisting underprivileged children, as well building bridge of understanding between diverse communities. She is Co- President of AAUW (American Association of University Women), Laguna Beach Branch—an international women’s organization that advocates equity for women. She is active with the American University of Beirut, and the Daniel Bliss Society Leadership Committee, and is past president of the Lebanese Ladies Cultural Society, an organization that teaches underprivileged students in Lebanon. She is also President and Founder of WIN, Women’s Intellectual Network in Orange County, a group that dedicates itself to building a strong community of women. She is a past board member of Contacts of Orange County, professional women’s group, past board member of Art Matrix, an organization that encourages art as means of expression for Students, and has been a member of several organizations that provide support for the community. She has been a member of Levantine Cultural Center’s national advisory board since 2007. In December 2010 she received the East-West Bridge builder Award, along with Jodie Evans and Roxana Saberi.

Elie Karam is an award-winning playwright, director and actor. Born in Beirut, he fled the Lebanese civil war to Vienna and Montreal to study Dramatic Arts. Relocating to post-war Beirut, he has written and directed critically acclaimed plays exposing important issues in the Middle East. His eclecticism has led him to write for French literary magazines, teach workshops at the University of Toronto, work in advertising for Grey Worldwide as well as exhibit art work in museums and create a hit Arab TV show. He’s been invited as a resident author at the Royal Court Theatre in London and his plays have been performed at the Theatre du Rond-Point in Paris and La Mama in New York. His new play “Tell Me About the War So I’ll Love You” received the prestigious Beaumarchais literary grant, the Lyon Author award and has been published in France by Actes-Sud. It was produced at the world-renowned Avignon Theater Festival in 2010. Elie Karam divides his time between Beirut, Paris and Los Angeles. He served as the artistic consultant for Levantine Cultural Center programs based on his many years’ experience in theatre, television and public events.

Mark LeVine a scholar, musician and activist with well over a decade of experience living and working in the Middle East, from Morocco to Iraq. As a guitarist and ‘oudist he has worked with Mick Jagger, Ozomatli, world music artist Hassan Hakmoun and blues and jazz greats Dr. John and Johnny Copeland. As an activist he has worked with various groups within the global peace and justice movement and spoken at some of its seminal gatherings, such as the Prague S26 Countersummit against the IMF in 2000. As a journalist he has written widely in the US and European press, including Le Monde, the Christian Science Monitor, Middle East Report, and Asia Times. As a scholar he has held positions at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University, the Society for Humanities at Cornell University, and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. LeVine is presently Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, Culture and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His other books include Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation (co-editor, Perceval Press, 2003), Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine (University of California Press, 2004) and Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies: Reconstructing Muslim Public Spheres, (co-editor, Palgrave Press, 2005). Two of his most recent books are Why They Don’t Hate Us, Unveiling the Axis of Evil (One World 2005) and Heavy Metal Islam, Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, Random House (July 2008). Read an interview with LeVine.

Diane Shammas received her PhD in international and intercultural education from the University of Southern California. Her regional focus is on MENA while her research centers around ethno-religious and transnational identity, interethnic and interfaith relations, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans post-9/11 and the diaspora in US and Europe, indigeneity, settler colonialism, and comparative analysis of African American and Palestinian liberatory struggles.

With more than 30 years’ experience with cultures and drumming of the Middle East and Mediterranean, Rowan Storm is recognized internationally as a performer, educator and frame drum designer. Rowan is pioneering the symmetrical frame drum playing position with her most recent design, Remo’s Thinline Frame Drum. The narrow frame and light weight enable both hands to engage equally in creative rhythmic expression, promoting balance between both brain hemispheres. Rowan’s first signature drum is an updated version of the archetypal women’s frame drum of Iran, the Rowan Storm Dayereh by Cooperman and by Remo.

Based in Athens, Greece for many years, Rowan has collaborated with some of the greatest masters of Middle Eastern music, including Naser Musa, Soheil Kaspar, Souren Baronian, Ross Daly, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Sahba Motallebi and Mohammad Reza Lotfi. Rowan teaches frame drum workshops and performs in prestigious venues throughout the US, Europe and the Middle East, including Istanbul’s Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall, Ankara’s Middle East Technical University, Greece’s Epidavros Ancient Amphitheater, European Music Conservatories, New York’s Lincoln Center, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, Craft and Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).Visit her site.

Susanna Whitmore Fránek is a native of Los Angeles and a descendent of one of L.A.’s Hispanic founding families whose roots go back to California’s pre-mission days. She spent many years abroad, living and traveling extensively in both Mexico and Spain. An ongoing interest in Arabic music and culture led her to teach and perform Middle Eastern dance during her seven years in Spain, while she also pursued studies in Flamenco and North Africa dance forms. More recently she has made a point of attending the Middle East Music and Dance Camp in Mendocino each year.

Upon her return to L.A. in the 80s, Susanna went to work for La Opinión, L.A.’s Spanish-language daily newspaper, where she expanded the portfolio of advertisers, served as a cultural liaison between corporate America and the Hispanic community, collaborated on various sales-related projects with the Los Angeles Times. Susanna also worked as VP of Sales at the Wave Community Newspapers, a group of weekly publications targeting Southern California’s African American and Hispanic communities.

Currently Susanna is a co-founder/part owner of a multicultural market research boutique as Principal and SVP of Business Development where she has developed key relationships within major corporations and multicultural advertising agencies, selling Hispanic, Asian and African American consumer-related qualitative and quantitative research and consulting. She has also spearheaded documentary-style film production, complimenting studies on Hispanic urban youth, barbershop discussions with African American men, identity making among Hmong students, an exposé on L.A.’s Asian Indian community, and the growth of store-front Evangelical churches catering to Hispanic immigrants.

Susanna graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies combining Spanish Literature, History and Anthropology. She is currently working on a Master’s Degree in Cultural Anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles. Her thesis topic is on the cultural movement evolving within the Middle Eastern music scene in Los Angeles, and the musicians that are using musical performance and collaboration to encourage intercultural exchange and understanding to promote a dialogue of co-existence and peace. Her goal is to make a documentary film to narrate this growing movement.

Joyce Zonana, born in Cairo and raised in New York City, earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to BMCC (Borough of Manhattan Community College) in 2006, she taught for 15 years at the University of New Orleans, where she was also Director of Women’s Studies. Several chapters from her new memoir, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey (Feminist Press 2008), have appeared in journals and books, including Meridians, International Sephardic Journal, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, and Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women. Her scholarly articles, on feminist theory and 19th century British literature, have appeared in Hudson Review, Signs, Victorian Poetry, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Journal of Narrative Technique.