What Do the Women Say? 2014

Maryam Keshavarz

Maryam Keshavarz has been making award-winning films for 11 years. While still an MFA student at NYU / Tisch, Maryam’s short film THE DAY I DIED won the Gold Teddy and Jury Award at the Berlin Film Festival and her feature documentary THE COLOR OF LOVE won top awards at Full Frame Festival and was broadcast internationally.  Maryam’s first narrative feature fiction film, CIRCUMSTANCE premiered to overwhelming critical acclaim at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, garnering the coveted Sundance Audience Award, leading to Maryam’s inclusion in Deadline.com’s 2011 Directors to Watch. CIRCUMSTANCE has won Best First Film at the Rome Film Festival and the Audience & Best Actress Awards at Outfest. The Independent Spirit Award nominated film was described by the New York Times as “Swirling and sensuous”, by the Wall Street Journal as “Supremely cinematic”, and by the Hollywood Reporter as “Amazingly accomplished.”  Maryam has received grants from the San Francisco Film Society and the Creative Capital Fund in support of her upcoming film THE LAST HAREM.

Zahra Noorbakhsh

Zahra Noorbakhsh is a writer, editor and international development consultant who has worked in the field of women’s human rights since 1998. Her first book, “Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women”, was featured globally by media including the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, Washington Post, Guardian, Times of India, Dawn Pakistan, and Jakarta Post. She was selected a ‘Muslim Leader of Tomorrow’ by the UN Alliance of Civilizations and the ASMA Society and has served on the boards of IDEX, the Women’s Funding Network, and World Pulse. Ayesha is an alumna of Voices of Our Nations writers’ workshop and a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Her latest book, “Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex & Intimacy” is now available through Beacon Press.

Mary Salome

Mary Salome is an Arab- and Irish-American media activist, writer, and producer of radio, video, and web publications. Her prose and poetry have been published in Sojourner Magazine, Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, and The Bakery, among other publications. She is the co-producer of the web site BintElNas.org and has been involved with Lit Crawl in San Francisco as a featured reader and a curator over the past three years.

Nyla Moujaes (TruBloo)

Nyla Moujaes (TruBloo) is a Lebanese-Armenian hip hop-poetry fusion emcee, percussionist, composer, cultural and justice worker. A music prodigy, Tru studied classical guitar and music theory as a young adolescent and won her first poetry slam at age 15. As half of the hip hop duo, NaR (fire, in Arabic), Tru performed at national and international festivals. When she’s not blessing mics, she’s either curating ground-breaking cultural events like Al Musiqa, Al Funoon, Music Without Borders, or the upcoming music and arts festival Hip Hop Beyond Gender (lapena.org) or in the courtroom advocating for homeless, differently-abled people in Berkeley as a staff attorney (homelessactioncenter.org).  To learn more visit, therealtrubloo.com

Ayesha Mattu

Ayesha Mattu is a writer, editor and international development consultant who has worked in the field of women’s human rights since 1998. Her first book, “Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women”, was featured globally by media including the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, Washington Post, Guardian, Times of India, Dawn Pakistan, and Jakarta Post. She was selected a ‘Muslim Leader of Tomorrow’ by the UN Alliance of Civilizations and the ASMA Society and has served on the boards of IDEX, the Women’s Funding Network, and World Pulse. Ayesha is an alumna of Voices of Our Nations writers’ workshop and a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Her latest book, “Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex & Intimacy” is now available through Beacon Press.

Happy/L.A. Hyder

As a visual artist and writer, Happy/L.A. Hyder first visited Lebanon a few years ago to explore a land that held many mythic qualities for a child growing up in the U.S. and with little family connections to the actual land. The resulting images are an homage to beauty, strength, & resilience. Her 1980 image, New Country Daughter-Lebanese American, is included in Lesbian Art in America, a history, Harmony Hammond, in the third edition of This Bridge Called My Back, writings by radical women of color, and in Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists.

Zeina Zaatari

Zeina Zaatari is currently working on a book project titled: Interrogating Heteronormativity in Lebanon: Family, Citizenship, and Access to Adulthood.  She is an independent lecturer, researcher, consultant focusing on gender and sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa. She earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology with an emphasis in Feminist Theory from UCD, and was the Regional Director for the MENA Program at Global Fund for Women, 2004-2012. Her publications include Telling Our Stories: Women’s Voices of the Middle East and North Africa (2011), Re-Imagining Family, Gender, and Sexuality: Feminist and LGBT Activism in the context of the 2006 Invasion of Lebanon co-written with Nadine Naber in the Journal Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power  (2014), Arab Feminist Awakening: Possibilities and Necessities in Arab Feminisms: A Critical Perspective (Bahithat, 2012 Arabic), In the Belly of the Beast: Struggling for Non-Violent Belonging in Arab and Arab American Feminisms (2011), among others.

Naima Shalhoub

Naima Shalhoub is a songstress, musician and educator who is thrilled to be making her Golden Thread debut in The Fifth String. After receiving her M.A. in Postcolonial Anthropology in San Francisco, Naima turned her focus toward music and song as vessels for story-telling, healing and movement building. Believing in the power of sharing messages from the soul through sound, Shalhoub immersed herself in her cultural roots in Lebanon and started writing her own music embracing both joy and sorrow, and the spaces between. In 2010 she began performing her music in the Bay Area, getting featured on radio stations and reputable venues, and began building fan bases internationally such as in Beirut and Kashmir. Naima recently released her first single and music video “herstory of soul,” and is currently teaching, performing, and working on her debut full-length album.