Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice weaves between culture, class, gender, religion, and family. She uses mixed media collage, immersive installation, fiber etching, and video to juxtapose discordant cultural references and to explore the connections between personal experience and larger social and political structures. Diaz is interested in complicated narratives of third-culture identity and the precarious spaces of invisibility and hyper-visibility where they often reside. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the rural highlands of southern Yemen, her work is often rooted in personal histories and competing cultural values.
Diaz has exhibited and performed at spaces including the Brava Theater in San Francisco, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, and the Torrance Art Museum. She is a recipient of the Harpo Visual Artists Grant and the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship and has works included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The University of California Los Angeles, and the Arab American National Museum. Her work has been featured in HyperAllergic, Artillery Magazine, and Kolaj Magazine. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Carol Abi Ghanem, also known as Hair [elshaar], uses words, music and politics to tell a story and provoke an emotion. Elshaar infiltrated the music industry as a laptop DJ back in 2011. She’s a genre-inclusive DJ from Lebanon, who loves to flirt through her music. Carol enjoys mixing different energies in sounds to sway between soulful electronic elements and dark techno grooves filled with fat basses. She often improvises depending on the energy she gets from the audience. In 2018, Elshaar started taking courses in music production in order to transform her poetry into musical pieces. Since then she has been training to expand her sets into hybrid performances showcasing her original work. As a social and political psychologist, carol experiments with tension and release with her listeners as a form of performative storytelling. As a producer, carol is a genre-bender, creating musical pieces containing hybrid combinations of styles to tell different narratives.
Lila Nazemian is an independent curator and the Special Projects Curator at ArteEast in New York. Recent and forthcoming curatorial projects include: “A Few in Many Places: New York” a thematic group exhibition organized by Protocinema that takes place simultaneously at multiple venues, across five regions and opening May 2021; “Now that We Have Established a Common Ground” forthcoming 2021 in collaboration with Assembly Room, New York; "I open my eyes and see myself under a tree laden with fruit that I cannot name" organized at New York's Center for Book Arts in January 2020; the “On Echoes of Invisible Hearts” series of location specific exhibitions featuring contemporary artists from Yemen and the Diaspora, the first took place in October 2018 at Berlin’s Poetry Project; and “Spheres of Influence,” which opened at Tehran’s Mohsen Gallery in April 2016. In 2017, she was the U.S. Projects Director at CULTURUNNERS, where, on behalf of the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra), she managed a Saudi artist residency in New York and supported various American Museums to produce their exhibitions of Saudi art. Prior to this, she was the Curatorial Associate at Leila Heller Gallery, New York for over four years.
Nazemian received a B.A. in History from Scripps College, California; and an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from N.Y.U., New York. She was a QAYYEM 2019 Curatorial Fellow, was among the inaugural participants of the 2018-2019 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York and participated in the Independent Curators International (ICI) 2018 Curatorial Intensive in Bangkok.
Ava Ansari is a transmedia poet, transcultural curator, and yogi (She/They). Ava is the Founding Director of Poetic Societies Global Network for the Somatic, Sonic, and Scenic Liberation in Detroit.
