(Arabic alphabetical order)

40MUSTAQEL is an independent design studio based in Cairo, and driven by a purpose to add to the ongoing conversations about graphic design taking place in the Arab/SWANA region. As a design studio, they embark an ongoing pursuit to explore what makes design “Arab” through an attempt to dissect the complexity of the diverse Arab visual languages.
Adele Jarrar is an independent curatorial and cultural worker and a researcher. Adele has an MA in arts and cultural management from Leuphana University Luneburg and a BA in architecture from Birzeit University. She has a wide-ranging experience in curating, writing, and production, and recently collaborated with The Question of Funding collective at documenta fifteen as a researcher for the Eltiqa exhibition in Kassel. In addition, she has also been a resident artist at Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, as part of Unidee Residency program 2022. Adele is interested in self-organization, artist-run initiatives, and digitality.
Ala Younis is an artist, with curatorial, film and publishing projects. Younis often seeks instances where historical and political events collapse into personal ones. She is co-Head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded,), co-Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2022, and research scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYUAD. In 2012, she co-founded the publishing initiative Kayfa ta.

Engy Mohsen is an artist and curator whose works explore notions of ‘participation’ and ‘collectivity’ by creating frameworks that invite non-artists and artists, and using conversation as a medium. Engy was one of the participating artists in “MASS Alexandria” (2019), “Artists for Artists: Radical Care” (2020), and “School of Commons” (2022). She is one of the five founding members of K-oh-llective (2020), an online platform that provides resources and facilitates conversations between art practitioners in Egypt and the Arab world. She holds  a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the German University in Cairo and the Brandenburg University of Technology (2018). She is pursuing a master’s degree in Transdisciplinary Studies from Zürich University of the Arts.

Batool El Hennawy is an artist and writer. She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University. She worked at CILAS in Cairo and Alexandria (2015 - 2019). She has joined various art institutes and educational initiatives in Cairo, Alexandria, and Amman as a curriculum designer, artist, curator, consultant, and researcher.

Hussein El-Hajj is an activist and researcher. He is the current coordinator of CILAS in Cairo and the founder/director of CILAS in Alexandria, where he is also teaching. Hussein has contributed to “Another Roadmap School”, an international platform that “provides open spaces for trans-regional exchange and learning in arts education as an engaged practice committed to social change”.

Hussein Shikha is a multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, writer, and researcher born and raised in Iraq, and moved to Antwerp in 2009 where he is currently based. His artistic practice considers the possibility of archiving, digitizing, manipulating, and transforming the visual culture present in the southern Iraqi carpets as a starting point to investigate theories and practices most appropriate for understanding design from an eastern and non-eastern perspective. Hussein Shikha was holds a master’s degree in visual arts from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and a postgraduate degree of Research in Art and Design at Sint Lucas Antwerp.

Abdelbaar Mounadi Idrissi is a freelance Moroccan translator, interpreter, subtitler, proofreader, and reviser, working with Arabic, English, Darija, and French. He has worked on projects with artists, scholars, humanitarian and human rights organizations, and NGOs. He’s a graduate of King Fahd School of Translation in Tangier, Morocco. His journey with languages spans between Morocco, Finland, where he attended a year of non-degree studies at the University of Eastern Finland with a grant from Erasmus+, and the United States, where he taught Arabic at Jackson State University in the state of Mississippi. 

Soukaina Joual is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her various works showcase an interest in how one’s body can translate and reflect various tensions, dynamics and differences. She usually focuses on the body from different perspectives, interaction with personal identity and ideological debates. Her work is context-specific, allowing her surroundings, people and places to define her artistic production. Soukaina was one of the participating artists in “MASS Alexandria” (2019) and “Artists for Artists: Radical Care” (2020). She is one of the five founding members of K-oh-llective (2020), an online platform that provides resources and facilitates conversations between art practitioners in Egypt and the Arab world. She has graduated from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, Morocco in 2011.


Farouk Elmerrakchi is a writer, author, and Professor of Electronics and Embedded Systems at Lycée Les Potiers and the University Institute of Technology in Toulouse, France. Since 2008, Farouk has started working on a writing project on electronics and science in Moroccan darija. He has written five science books for adults and children and ten booklets for children. He started developing his practical concepts at Ibn Youssef Elementary School, which is also called the “Drouj School”, and he obtained a master’s degree in research in the field of Electronics at the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Toulouse.

Lina Mounzer is a Lebanese writer and translator. She contributes regularly to The New York Times and her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Economist's 1843 Magazine, and The Baffler, as well as in the anthologies Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women (Telegram Books: 2007) and Tales of Two Planets (Penguin: 2020). Recently, her essay “The Gamble” was chosen for Best American Essays 2022 and will be appearing in a forthcoming anthology. She has also translated, with pleasure, work by the Lebanese authors Chaza Charafeddine, Hassan Daoud, and Hazem Saghieh.

Mohamed Abdelkarim is a performer, filmmaker, and researcher. His practice is performance-oriented, in which he considers performance as a method and practice that reflects on performative acts like narrating, singing, detecting, doing, fictioning, and speculating. His current umbrella project focuses on the agency of the landscape as a witness of "a history we missed and a future we did not attend yet". Abdelkarim received his MA in Arts in public spheres from édhéa /ecav, Switzerlands, 2016 and is currently Ph.D. candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. Abdelkarim is living and working between Cairo and Rotterdam.

Mostafa Elbaroody is a Cairo-based architect and visual artist. As an architect he took part in designing several local projects, some of which are currently under construction, alongside working on many international competitions. He’s also taught and conducted many workshops on computational design at the American University in Cairo and several other formal and informal educational settings. Elbaroody’s artistic practice incorporates different forms of digital image production and processing, from generative design to immersive/interactive experiences to imagine and articulate more representative and viable imaginaries for our co-dependency within ecological and technological systems. He is currently pursuing his independent studies at The New Centre for Research & Practice.

Mooni Studio is a design, research and art duo based in Jerusalem/Amsterdam. Their diverse practice is present in both commissioned and self initiated projects.

Mays Albaik is a Palestinian artist with a visual practice triangulating body, language, and place. Through text, video, and sculptures, her work layers a personal poetics onto the sociopolitics that define relationships to geography. Albaik was a finalist in the Inaugural Richard Milles Art Prize, and her work was displayed internationally, including The Louvre Abu Dhabi; Darat Al Funun Lab, Jordan; Grey Noise, Dubai; and Heix Art Gallery, New York. Albaik holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives and works in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Nassim Azarzar is an artist who develops a research around imagery, even popular imaginaries by exploring their different forms, occurrences and devices of representation in a Moroccan context. For several years, he has been developing an ongoing project called «Bonne route» dealing with decorative practices applied to trucks transporting goods between the port cities of Tangier, Casablanca and Agadir in particular and the Moroccan villages of the Atlas and the Rif. Azarzar’s aesthetic research evolves around decorative arts, painting, drawing, sculpture and experimental cinema.

Huda Zikry is a visual artist and researcher in contemporary art history. She explore her interests in art history, art education, and translation, and hopes to develop a interdisciplinary practice that freely moves between translation as a method for learning and research, and between writing and text as a medium. She joined StudioKhana for Contemporary Art and Cultural Development in 2016. Since then, she has worked on designing and facilitating three editions of the annual Student Council Program, and the culminating group exhibitions. She has studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University, where she received bachelor’s degree in 2016, and is currently pursing a master’s degree from The Department of Art History within the same university.