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-------------The R-Shief Team------------- | |
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Laila Shereen Sakr is a media artist and critic known as VJ Um Amel. Recent reviews of her work have been published in The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, VirtualPolitik, and The Creators Project. Her data visualizations have been shown at the “interACTIVATE” exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The semantic Web analysis she built for R-Shief won the 2011 CRUNCH Design Challenge at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, and her digital Gaza archive earned her the 2009 American-Arab Anti-Discrimination (ADC) Media Scholarship Award. As a poet, she is published as Laila Shereen. She has co-founded spoken word and hip-hop collectives in Washington, D.C.--Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency and Word of Mouth. Shereen Sakr holds an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2010, she was nominated as a Macarthur Foundation HASTAC scholar. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where she was awarded an Annenberg Fellowship.
Project Lead current location: Los Angeles, California |
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Eyad Zahra, Director, Producer, and Writer, has produced various short films and television segments since 2004. Zahra’s most acclaimed short film, Distance from the Sun (2004), garnered over twenty film festival invitations worldwide, and in November 2004 it won Dubai Media City’s Ibda’a Best Film Award. Afterwards, Eyad continued producing for Showtime Arabia, and worked on Salaam MTV, the Middle East’s first ever MTV brand show. In 2007, Zahra’s feature screenplay, Sammy Paradise, was accepted into the 3rd Annual RAWI Screenwriters lab, hosted by the Royal Film Commission of Jordan and the Sundance Institute. In 2010, Zahra debuted his first feature film The Taqwacores, at the Sundance Film Festival. The award-winning film about Punk American Muslims went on to play in over thirty international film festivals. The film has been written about in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and featured on Al-Jazeera’s The Fabulous Motion Picture Show. Eyad graduated from the Florida State University School of Motion Picture, Television, & the Recording Arts. He also received the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Mass Communications Scholarship Award and the Florida State University Humanitarian of the Year Award.
Film and Video Lead current location: Los Angeles, California |
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Manal Hassan is an IT Consultant, Experienced Web Developer & Designer and a FOSS enthusiast, currently in South Africa. Her main interest is adapting and delivering technology to non-technical experts, and training them in making it their own. She co-founded the Egyptian GNU/Linux Users Group (EGLUG) in 2004, and has extensive experience in working with NGOs, human rights activists, and children on web technologies and new media. She won the Best of Blogs (BOBs) and Reporters without Borders award together with her husband in 2005. Manal’s specialties include Drupal, HTML, PHP, CSS, training, Linux, FOSS, websites, portals, multilingual websites, RTL designs, mentoring, Drupal theming.
Arabic-Language Lead Programmer current location: Cairo, Egypt |
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Farrah Farley completed her Master's degree in Global Policy Studies at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2011. Farrah concentrates her research, case studies, and policy and media analysis on the Middle East Region and has a natural capacity for cross-cultural communication, cultural sensitivity, and leadership. She has spent the majority of her summers and some winters immersed in Arab culture in the MENA region and speaks Arabic, French, and Spanish. Farrah is also the Marketing and Social Media Project Coordinator for the Rainforest Partnership, an Austin-based Nonprofit. Before moving from DC to Austin in 2009, Farrah worked for three years as a Paralegal at the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Immigration Litigation. In 2006, Farrah received her Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University where she concentrated her studies on the Middle East region. Farrah is an activist at heart who wishes for social justice, human, and environmental rights for all.
Student Intern current location: Austin, Texas |