Tania El Khoury is a live artist who creates interactive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual materials collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, ultimately transformed through audience interaction. El Khoury’s work engages questions of displacement, border systems, privatization, state violence, and the politics of space. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessie Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. She served as a member of the ANTI Festival Advisory Board and is currently serving on the Advisory Board of The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary. Her work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 35 countries across six continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. Tania is Distinguished Artist in Residence and Associate Professor of Theater & Performance at Bard College in New York where she is also the founding director of the Center for Human Rights & the Arts. She holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is associated with Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK and is a founding member of the urban research and live art collective in Lebanon, Dictaphone Group.

Ziad Abu-Rish is a scholar of the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. His research centers around state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan. He earned his PhD in History from the University of California Los Angeles, and his MA in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Abu-Rish is author of The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and Institution Building in the Wake of Independence (forthcoming from Stanford University Press), and coeditor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (2012). He is the author of several articles and chapters, including “Garbage Politics in Lebanon,” “Municipal Elections in Lebanon,” and “Lebanon Beyond Exceptionalism.” He serves as coeditor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine, and codirector of the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute. Abu-Rish is Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle East Studies at Bard College, where he also directs the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts.