Salwa Mikdadi
Salwa Mikdadi is Associate Professor of Art History at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is the author and editor of several books and essays on Arab and Palestinian art and was the curator of the first Palestinian Pavilion for 2009 Venice Biennial. Mikdadi helped establish several art and culture programs in the US, the UAE and in Palestine and the first professional development programs for museum professionals in the UAE and was lecturer at Paris Sorbonne Abu Dhabi. She is a founding member of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran and Turkey.
Sam Bahour
Sam Bahour resides in Al-Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine. He does business consulting as Applied Information Management (AIM), specializing in business development with a niche focus on the information technology sector and start-ups. Bahour was instrumental in the establishment of two publicly traded firms: the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL) and the Arab Palestinian Shopping Centers (APSC). He is Co-founder & Emeritus Member of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy (A4VPE). He currently is an independent Director at the Arab Islamic Bank PLC and a board member at Just Vision. He writes frequently on Palestinian affairs and has been widely published in leading outlets. He is co-editor of HOMELAND: Oral History of Palestine and Palestinians (Olive Branch Press, 1993), tweets at @SamBahour, and blogs at epalestine.ps.
Saleh Hijazi
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Saleh Hijazi is a human rights activist and researcher presently living in London where he works at Amnesty International. He is advisor to Al-Quds University Human Rights Clinic where he worked as academic coordinator and lecturer. Saleh holds a master’s degree in human rights from the University of Essex and a bachelor degree in philosophy and political science from Lawrence University. His interests are social movements and caricature.
Salim Tamari
Salim Tamari is a senior fellow and director of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies which is affiliated with the Institute for Palestine Studies. He is editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Hawliyyat al Quds. He is professor of sociology at Birzeit University and has authored several works on urban culture, political sociology, biography and social history, and the social history of the Eastern Mediterranean. He has served as visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Eric Lane Fellow at Cambridge University among other posts.
Rayya El Zein
Al-Shabaka Member Rayya El Zein is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research concerns performance, media, popular culture, the political economy of leisure, and spectatorship in urban Arab contexts and diasporas.
Razi Nabulse
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Razi Nabulse is a political and social activist on Palestinian issues. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Haifa, and has worked in the field of journalism and media. Nabulse was editor of Israeli and international affairs, and has published a number of articles and policy papers on the Zionist project and the Palestinian national project in several journals and for different research institutions. He is currently a researcher and coordinator of the “Zionist Project” study program at the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies (Masarat). He is an expert commentator on Israeli politics as well as the developments and transformations in the settler-colonial project.
Refqa Abu-Remaileh
Refqa Abu-Remaileh is professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Arabic Department, specializing in Palestinian literature and film. She is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project “PalREAD – Country of Words: Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present” (2018-2023). She received her MSt in modern Middle Eastern Studies and DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford (2004, 2010).
Rawan Damen
Al-Shabaka Member Rawan Damen has produced and directed more than 25 hours of TV documentaries, translated into multiple languages, including the award-winning Al Nakba series. Rawan worked as a senior commissioning producer at Al Jazeera Media Network from 2008 to 2016, where she supervised 250 hours of documentaries. She has founded and led teams on multiple digital platforms, notably the innovative project Palestine Remix and was awarded the Media Creativity Award from the Arab Thought Foundation in December 2015. Rawan holds an MA in Communications Studies from Leeds University, UK, and a BA in Media and Sociology from Berziet University, Palestine.
Raed Eshnaiwer
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Raed Eshnaiwer is a PhD candidate at Universite Libre de Bruxelles, in Political Science, European Studies and Area Studies. Raed’s research focuses on the impact of forced migration on the identity of the state: Syrian refugees in Jordan as a case study.
