Queer for Palestine

Razan AlSalah is a video artist investigating the material-aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds, breaking these thresholds of view into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense. Her work has been screened in community-based and international film festivals. She teaches at Concordia University in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.

Farah Atoui is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies (co-supervisors: Darin Barney and Jennifer Burman). Farah worked at the Sharjah Art Foundation and Art Dubai, two cultural institutions based in the United Arab Emirates (2007-2013). She moved to Montreal in 2013, where she completed a Master’s degree in Media Studies at Concordia University (2015). Her doctoral research investigates the relation between visual mediation and cross-border human migration in the context of the current so-called migration/refugee crisis. She is a SSHRC doctoral fellow, and is affiliated to the Middle East Studies Association, the Grierson Research Group, the Feminist Media Studio, and the McGill Refugee Research Group. She is also a member of the Regards palestiniens and Regards syriens screening collectives.

Muhammad Nour-Elkhairy (Associate Programmer, Cinema Politica) is a Palestinian filmmaker, video artist and film programmer based in Montreal. A graduate from the MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production at Concordia University, his work is interest in how power relations play out in the daily lives of individuals, and how they are maintained and mediated through Moving images.

Viviane Saglier received her PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University in Montreal. She also holds an MA in Film Studies from Concordia, a BA in Art History from the École du Louvre, and a BA in Film and French Modern Literature from Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. Viviane’s FRQSC-funded doctoral thesis, Paradoxical Economies: A Time for Palestinian Cinema (2019), analyzed the material conditions of possibility and the imaginaries that sustain the contemporary project of a transnational Palestinian film industry. Her postdoctoral research further examines creative economies at the scale of the Arab world. More particularly, she is interested in the theoretical potential of crossing the study of affect, media infrastructures, and human rights economies to understand the formation of contemporary political images. Her writings on Arab cinema, media economies, and transnational solidarity have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. Outside the university, she curates programs of Arab cinema and political documentaries. At McGill, Viviane works under the supervision of Diana Allan in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID).