Historian Researcher | Artist filmmaker | Cultural Worker | Virtual and Augmented Reality Developper
Treasures grow richer when shared. Whenever possible, I will put my archives, references, and work available online.
I was born in Qatar, spent my primary in Beirut, my secondary in Tiohtiá:ke | Mooniyang’s (Montreal), and from university onwards between Beirut and Paris, with a few years dispatched between Alexandria, Istanbul, Tourcoing, and Cannes.
Trained as a researcher — Master’s in History/International Relations and a Diplôme d’Études Approfondies in Political Sciences from Saint-Joseph University (USJ-Beirut) — I spent over a decade bridging academia and cultural practice across international university environments (USJ and American University of Paris AUP). My work focused on 19th century Arab intellectuals, the sociology of secret and esoteric societies, and socio-cultural transformations driven by information and communication technologies in the modern Arab world.
As an early adopter of digital technologies, I built subject-specific archival databases, collaborating with Beirut’s artistic vanguard — Mafhoum.com, Arab Image Foundation, Ashkal Alwan, Nadi Lekol Nas —.
I carried my researchers’ suitcase in humanities and social sciences to the art and cinema worlds first via le Fresnoy, National Studio for Contemporary Arts in France where I began translating research into film – a practice that expanded over the next decade into eight short to medium length films, five multidisciplinary artworks: photo series, immersive installations, and robotic sculptures… These works were exhibited worldwide from Dubai Art Fair, Dubai Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, MAXXI Rome, and Cannes Film Festival, to name a few. From tactile (stop-motion, analog film) to digital (VFX, fulldome), and sonic (soundtracks, musical voyages) to archives (photography archives, lost and found old music, globally-sourced recycled objects).
In my artwork I use History for its collective memory, music for its Dionysian effect, and animation for its distanced wit. Thematically, exile and disembodiment are omnipresent elements, love and kinship a constant concern.
2017 pivotal year. I worked for five months as a cultural mediator with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders — MSF) on Mediterranean refugee search and rescue emergency missions. I wrote and produced “What Happens to a Displaced Ant”, a 42-minute an epistolary docu-fiction shot with my smartphone. That same year I took part of the Lebanon Factory program, opening the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, and moved to Lebanon to produce my first feature film with a solo exhibition at Galerie Tanit Beirut.
2019 rupture year. After understanding at the Cannes XR market that virtual and augmented reality is what I needed in narratives and storytelling, the revolution in Lebanon, the economic collapse, the pandemic, and the port explosion, stirred up the cards again. I work, among other things, with “Workers of Art and Culture”, a group born from the revolution to find alternative ways of art production, — reimagining syndicates, cooperative approaches, and sustainable frameworks for film and artistic labor.
I return to Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) to join my family and immediately embark a one year intensive virtual and augmented reality program of the Grasset Institute.
Today, I can at last join the academic and artistic paths in a reserach-creation PhD in digital creativity at NAD-UQAC (école du numérique art et design) with an axis on immersive digital archives and augmented museography. More specifically I work on new strategies of immersive storytelling that challenge colonial narratives. I am part of the NAD Mimesis Lab and Hexagram (a network of research-creation in arts, culture and technologies).
Beyond academia, I co-founded SAWA a Collective of three women working to stitch Global South communities together through arts, culture, and collective action.
In short, this is my practice:
Storytelling as guardianship of the past, cultural work as solidarity for the present, and refiguration as blueprint for the future. The goal? To prove a better world is possible, one conversation, one project at a time.
