Naeem Mohaiemen is a writer-filmmaker, specializing in Political Islam. He is Editor of Progressive Muslim website Shobak.Org and director of Muslims or Heretics, a documentary about struggles between moderate and radical Muslims. Naeem's work and writing has been featured in The Washington Post, The Village Voice, NY Daily News, Tikkun, New Haven Advocate, Bright Lights Film Journal, Alternet, CounterPunch, Subcontinental, Channel 4 (UK), Chimurenga (South Africa), Wordt Vervolgd (Netherlands), Deseret News (Utah), New Architecture (UK), New Internationalist (UK), Prothom Alo (Bangladesh), Dawn (Pakistan), and Rediff (India). Naeem will be published in the forthcoming Difference Engines: Thinking Race and Technology (MIT Press). His recent work on the fusion of Islam, Pop Culture and Globalization is being presented at lectures at Pixelache in Stockholm and Helsinki.. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Anandaroop Roy is an information designer and cartographer living in Brooklyn, NY. He is a member of the SAMAR Collective, 3rd I NY and CounterConvention.org (summer 2004). As a veteran of the New York dotcom world, he was a lead information architect for Sotheby's first online auction site. He has been a web/technology consultant for many figures in the New York South Asian electronic music scene, including DJ Rekha (Sangam Entertainment), Vivek Bald (Mutiny documentary) and Karsh Kale (Asian Massive). His current design clients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society, Color Lines magazine, Yale University Press and many other museums and publishers. His cartography work can be seen at anandarooproy.com/maps.
Ibrahim Quraishi is a conceptual artist, activist and artistic director of Compagnie Faim de Siecle. Some of his most recent pieces have been commissioned by The Japan Foundation (Tokyo), Festival Avril.DOT (Paris), G. A. S. Gallery (NY), MESS Festival, (Sarajevo), Le Batofar (Paris), Saison France/Quebec (Quebec City), Muffathalle (Munich), Downtown Arts Festival (NY), Biennial Interferences (Belfort-Montbilliard), Acco Festival (Acco-Israel), Bronx Museum of Arts (Bronx, NY), Gallery Mains d'Oeuvres (St. Ouen), Nouveau Casino (Paris), Le Lieu Unique (Nantes), LA Edge Festival (Los Angeles), The Kitchen (NY), Festival Ounze (Paris), Dastaan (Lahore), and The International Schillertage Festival (Mannheim).
Aziz Huq is a second-generation Bangladeshi immigrant. After graduating from Columbia Law School, Aziz worked as a clerk to federal judges in the federal appeals court that sits in New York and in the U.S. Supreme Court. He has worked in addition for the International Crisis Group, doing extensive fieldwork and reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal. Aziz's previous legal scholarship has focused on the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and on immigration reform. In Afghanistan, Aziz wrote and advocated on a meaningfully democratic constitutional process and a functioning justice system. His research in Pakistan, similarly, trained on ways of improving the courts. In Nepal, he has written on and advocated for peaceful, constitutional resolution of an eight-year civil war. He presently works with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School on democracy and national security issues.
Ron Kiley is a photographer and a member of Compagnie Faim de Siècle. His images have been published in Interview, New York Magazine, Village Voice, New York Times, SHOUT and Dance Magazine. His most recent solo exhibitions, dealing with post 9/11 trauma, have been at Spooky Night (St. Ouen, France, 2001) and the 12th International Schillertage (Mannheim, Germany, 2003). Ron was the Former Chairman of New York State Common Cause (non-partisan citizen's lobby for honest and accountable government) and an Air Force Veteran of the Vietnam era.
Left to Right: Naeem, Kristofer, Donna, Aziz Anandaroop, and Vivek Bald
Vivek Bald is a New York based documentary filmmaker and music producer and one of the pioneers of NYC's South Asian electronic music scene. Bald's film work includes Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994), an early chronicle of the lives, experiences and political activism of South Asian immigrant taxi drivers in New York City, and more recently Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003), a melding of music documentary and social documentary which charts the meteoric rise of South Asian electronic music in 1990s Britain. Producing and performing music under the name Siraiki, Bald co-founded the groundbreaking Mutiny club-night in 1997, and continues to produce original compositions.
Sarah Olson is an independent radio producer, freelance journalist, and media activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her freelance radio productions have aired on Free Speech Radio News, the National Radio Project's Making Contact, the Women's International News Gathering Service, and Pacifica Radio. In addition, she works as a mentor and produce at the Welfare Radio Collaborative, training low-income women to produce radio. She is the producer of Under Attack: Arab, Muslim, and South Asian Communities Since September 11th, produced in collaboration with the Not In Our Name Project. She recently returned from the West Bank where she interviewed Palestinian women about occupation and patriarchy.
Sehban Zaidi is a filmmaker who grew up in Karachi. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and studied film production at NYU/TISCH. Sehban’s short film Pariah premiered at the Kara International Film Festival (Pakistan). His second film Kyaari screened at the South Asian Journalists Conference. Sehban was assistant director for the Pakistani television series Pehchaan.
Shahed Amanullah has been a leader in community building over the Internet through creating online discussion groups and Islamic websites. His work and writings have been featured in Newsweek, San Jose Mercury News, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC News, National Public Radio, BeliefNet, San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Alternet, and the Dallas Morning News. His television appearances include "Nightline with Ted Koppel", CNN, the "Today Show", "America's Most Wanted", and "Internet Café". Shahed writes regularly about the challenges and opportunities facing Islam in America for various online and print media, is an Associate Editor of "The American Muslim" (theamericanmuslim.org), and is the Editor-in-Chief of altmuslim.com, a news and discussion website.
Kristofer Dan-Bergman (KDB) is a Swedish born New York residing photographer. Kristofer works in the areas of Documentary, Editorial, Commercial as well as Fine Arts and Documentary photography. He has shot campaigns for clients like Tag Heure, Remy Martin and Pfizer and photographed for magazines such as Essence, Fitness and Elle. Kristofer has had several solo exhibitions (Documentaries "Kenya: Garissa", "India: Rajasthan", "Mali", and Fine Arts "Touch", "Unbound" and "Agile"). He has also participated in several group shows. Kristofer has won the Advertising Photographers of America Award (APA) and is represented in the permanent collection of the Internation Center of Photography (ICP).
Anjali Malhotra (idk) is a New York based filmmaker and video editor. She worked as an editor on various short documentaries and films, and co-edited a documentary about the dying musical tradition of the courtesans of Northern India. She is currently working on a project on Indian call centers. She also edited a film installation for an art exhibit called Azimuth.
Sarah Husain is a Pakistani-American activist/ poet/ mother who was born in New York City but grew up in Hong Kong, Sudan and Pakistan. She has been writing since the age of 16 and organizing grassroots anti-violence community projects, linking communities of color around issues of police brutality, anti immigrant and detention, to anti-domestic violence work. Her poetry deals with identity, memory, nation, violence, bio-terrorism and the female body. She is currently working on a forthcoming anthology of contemporary Muslim women’s writings on War.
Amy Heuer is a student at Bennington College, concentrating in political philosophy. Amy is a member of the college’s chapter of CAN (Campus Anti-war Network), where she does counter-recruitment work. She worked on the Disappeared project as part of an internship through Not In Our Name, a national anti-war organization that stands firmly opposed to military recruitment, round-ups and detentions, and preemptive war on the world.