Photos: 2004 - 2022
Aisha Mershani
LEAD ARTIST AND PROJECT DIRECTOR
Aisha Mershani (they/them) was born in Las Vegas, Nevada to an American Jewish mother and a Moroccan Muslim father. Mershani holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Redlands in California, and a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree from the UNESCO program in Peace, Development Studies, and Conflict Transformation at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló de la Plana, Spain. From 2003-2022 Mershani focused their subject on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Aisha has photographed military checkpoints, popular demonstrations, house demolitions, destroyed villages, and the daily lives of Palestinians living under the violence of the Israeli occupation. Mershani’s photographs have been in multiple publications, as well as many internet news sites over the years to further the awareness of the ongoing situation on the ground in Palestine. Aisha is also one of the artists in the reference book, “Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists”. Aisha Mershani is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Gettysburg College and combines their scholarly work with their media activism.
Nora
DEVELOPMENT AND LOGISTICS DIRECTOR
Nora is an urbanist who has worked at the intersections of project-based curriculum/education, arts, culture, energy/climate justice, and community development. Currently, Nora’s day job is working with communities across the US to organize and collectively advocate for energy democracy. She also runs a community newspaper, fiscal-sponsored project financial management, and facilitates workshops, conversations, and panels to break down boundaries through art and storytelling. Nora is Egyptian/US-ian who grew up/lived between Egypt and the US and worked there as an educator and activist.
Qais Assali
LEAD DESIGNER AND CO-CURATOR
Qais Assali (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist/designer born in Palestine in 1987 and raised in the UAE. Assali uses visual analogy, translation, substitution, and appropriation strategies to rethink forms of communication architectures. Assali was a 2019-21 Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and the recipient of 2021 Art Matters Foundation grant. Assali taught in Visual Communication in several art schools in Palestine and the US, currently, a Professor of the Practice in Graphic Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston at Tufts University.
Khalida Sethi
TRAUMA CONSULTANT
Khalida Sethi, LCSW is a therapist who specializes in trauma and anxiety. She has worked with refugee populations and survivors of war and displacement in the Philadelphia region for over ten years. Her own life experiences as a refugee of the Afghan war have led to her passion to advocate on a macro level and to work to ensure that the activism others are doing are not exploitative or further hurting the populations they seek to spotlight. Khalida sees herself playing an emotionally supporting role for the activists and agitators so that they can continue doing the work that they do.
Eva Najjar
WEB DESIGNER AND DEVELOPER
Tracy Chahwan
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Yaqeen Yamani
PROGRAMMING ASSOCIATE
Ahmed Ahmed
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Tara Tarawneh
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
S. Maham Rizvi
CULINARY CURATOR