Events

This moderated discussion will address issues of Palestinian artistic and cultural expression, contextualized by global debates in contemporary museology.

Adila Laïdi-Hanieh is an author, scholar, and curator focusing on Palestinian arts and cultural practices, modern Arab intellectual history, and cultural spaces and processes. As the Former Director General of the Palestinian Museum (2018-2023), she developed its first five-year program strategy with the mission to produce and disseminate emancipatory learning experiences about Palestine.

Dr. Laïdi-Hanieh is the author of the artist biography Fahrelnissa Zeid: Painter of Inner Worlds (2017) and the 2008 cultural anthology: Palestine. Rien ne nous manque ici (Palestine: We Lack for Nothing Here). She is also the founding director of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah and taught modern Arab intellectual history and art history at Birzeit University.

Earlier this year, Dr. Laïdi-Hanieh was awarded the prestigious National Order of Merit by France (Chevalier de l'Ordre national du Merite). She is also a recipient of the Hypatia Award and was named one of Blooloop's Power 10 influencers in the museum industry. Adila received her PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University as a Fulbright Scholar and obtained an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.

Ursula Lindsey is a journalist and literary critic. She has lived in Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan. Ursula writes for The New York Review of Books and co-hosts the BULAQ podcast, which focuses on Arabic literature in translation. She was an editor of The Arabist blog, reported from Egypt for many years for the BBC-PRI radio program, The World, and covered the Arab Spring for Newsweek, The New York Times, The New Yorker online and the London Review of Books. From 2011 to 2014, Ursula was the Chronicle of Higher Education's Middle East correspondent.