Meet the Team

• Assia Boundaoui || Creative Director

  Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American filmmaker, writer and investigative journalist. Her debut short film about hijabi hair salons for the HBO Documentary Films the “LENNY” series premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning feature-length directorial debut, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia's Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, won the jury prize for Best Documentary at the Woodstock Film Festival and was nationally broadcast on PBS "POV" in 2019. Assia was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and her work has been the recipient of support from the Ford Foundation JustFilms, International Documentary Association, San Francisco Film Society, Impact Partners and Firelight Media and FRONTLINE among others. Assia was a 2019 New America National Fellow and in 2020 was honored to be the recipient of the Livingston Award for national reporting.

  She is currently a Ford Foundation JustFilms fellow hosted at the MIT Open Documentary Lab Co-Creation Studio where she is iterating a co-created, AI fueled sequel to her film: the Inverse Surveillance Project. She has an M.A. in journalism from New York University and is an Algiers born, Arabic speaking Chicagoan currently based in Chicago,IL.

• Nouha Boundaoui || Producer

  Nouha Boundaoui is a public health researcher and health justice and anti-surveillance advocate. As a graduate of Northwestern University and the Rollins School of Public Health, Nouha is dedicated to investigating the intersections of race and health and understanding how social determinants of health impact the health and freedoms of communities of color. As an advocate with All Options, a reproductive justice organization, and volunteer with Believer's Bail Out, a community led bail fund freeing Muslims from pre-trial & immigration incarceration, she believes deeply in building a world that prioritizes the health, healing, and liberation of all.

• Yucef Merhi || Collaborating Artist

  Yucef Merhi is an artist, coder, researcher, and curator, interested in raising cultural awareness through technology and language. Yucef has produced a wide body of works that engage poetry, hacking, facial recognition, AI, VR and retro video game platforms, towards the formulation of interactive experiences and environments. He is a pioneer of Digital Art, and is known for making the first work of art that included a video game console—the Atari 2600—back in 1985.

  Merhi holds a Master’s from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and has taught Digital Art at numerous universities in the US, Venezuela and Ecuador. Over the past 25 years, he has been invited to lecture at ACM-MM, SIGGRAPH, New York University, The New School, Pratt Institute, Pace University, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, California Arts Institute, as well as several museums around the globe.

• Dr. Kameelah Mu'Min Rashad || Collaborator

  Dr. Kameelah Mu’Min Rashad is the Founding President of Muslim Wellness Foundation (MWF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting healing and emotional well-being in the American Muslim community. Through MWF, Dr. Mu’Min Rashad has established the Omar ibn Said Institute for Black Muslim Studies & Research, and the annual Black Muslim Psychology Conference. Dr. Mu’Min Rashad is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology and Muslim Studies at Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS) and CTS' Project Director for the InterAct on Race Project: Engaging Diverse Faith Communities in Anti-Racist Work. She is also Visiting Faculty at Bayan Islamic Graduate School. Dr. Rashad teaches the following courses: Self-Care and Self- Development for Spiritual Care Providers, Intentional Community Building in/through the Black Muslim Imagination, the Psychology of Christian Hegemony and Religious Oppression in the United States, and Black Muslim Psychology, Activism & Healing.

  Dr. Mu’Min Rashad graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Psychology and MEd in Psychological Services. She holds a second Masters in Restorative Practices & Youth Counseling (MRP) from the International Institute for Restorative Practices. Dr. Rashad completed her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, PA.

• Wafa Ghnaim || Collaborator

  Wafa Ghnaim is a Palestinian-American artist, researcher, writer, and educator who began learning Palestinian embroidery from her mother, award-winning artist Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim, when she was two years old. Her first book, “Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora” (2018), documents the traditional patterns passed to her by her mother. Wafa has since become a leading educator in the field as the first-ever Palestinian embroidery instructor at the Smithsonian Museum, and an artist-in-residence at the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, D.C. In addition to her extensive scholarship, Wafa continues her mother’s educational legacy through Tatreez & Tea, a global arts education initiative she began in 2016. Wafa has been featured in major media outlets, recently featured in Vogue Magazine, naming her and her mother “the world’s leading guardians of tatreez”. Wafa currently resides in Washington, D.C. 

• Katerina Cizek

  Katerina Cizek is a two-time Emmy and Peabody-winning documentarian working with emergent technologies. She is the artistic director and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. At the studio, she wrote (with Uricchio et al.) the world’s first field study on co-creating media called Collective Wisdom (forthcoming with MIT Press in 2022). At the studio, she designs and facilitates co-creation workshops, research, delegations and fellowships fusing art, documentary and journalism together with emergent tech and science through the practice of collective creation.

  For over a decade, Cizek worked as a documentary director at the National Film Board of Canada, transforming the organization into a world-leading digital hub, with the projects HIGHRISE and Filmmaker-in-Residence. Both community-based and globally recognized, these two ground-breaking long-form digital projects garnered international awards and critical acclaim. Cizek’s earlier award-winning human rights documentary film projects instigated criminal investigations, changed UN policies, and screened as evidence at an International Criminal Tribunal.

• Shirin Anlen

  Shirin Anlen is an artist and creative technologist based in California and New York. Her artistic practice involves creative coding, interaction design, drawings, and data research that form the basis for real-life storytelling in emerging technologies — such as AR, VR, web platforms, and machine learning. shirin was an artist in residence at the National Film Board of Canada and a member at the NEW INC incubator together with Raycaster, an experience design studio she co-founded.

  She received the best digital story by the Biennial of Medial Arts of Chile; a research grant from the Knight Foundation, and an art commission from IDFA DocLab. She curated the VR program of DocAviv festival in the years 2016-2019, co-founded the first VR and interactive storytelling festival and lab in Israel, Steamer Salon and a member of Women+ Art AI collective. shirin holds an MFA in cinema and television from Tel Aviv University and is a research fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Currently she’s exploring how alternative narratives can design new discourses around mental disability.

• Joy / Jade

  Joy / Jade is a designer and developer based in Los Angeles. She works with organizers, collectives, and projects invested in abolition, critical inquiry, art, and something more sustainable.