Joanne Randa Nucho is an anthropologist and filmmaker. Her book, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services and Power (Princeton University Press, 2016), is about how fragmented infrastructures in Lebanon — things like private electricity generator subscription systems and social welfare managed by religious-affiliated institutions— help to produce and recalibrate notions of sectarian belonging and exclusion, and how people challenge or contest these channels. She has written extensively on the erosion of public and collective goods, from decentralized solar energy and electricity fragmentation in Lebanon, to a new project about the emergence of home backup battery systems and microgrids in the context of renewable energy transition in California.
Her films have screened in various contexts including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2017. Her feature length experimental documentary, The Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud, engages with the experiences of residents of Bourj Hammoud, a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, through drawings and stories. An associated website, Mapping Bourj Hammoud, features the drawings made by participants throughout the production of the film. Her short experimental film, Gigi (from 9-5) from 2001, is part of filmmaker Miranda July’s feminist film collection Joanie4Jackie, now held in the Getty research collection.
https://www.joannenucho.com/
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Associate Professor of Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design, and a 2024-25 Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge University. Her creative and critical research focus on ancestral intelligences, data feminist interventions in computational media rooted in ancestral, non-Western knowledge systems. She is the author of The Institute for Other Intelligences (X Artists’ Books, 2022), an artist book and work of speculative feminist media theory that presents lectures on data justice delivered by “artificial killjoys.” Her recent multidisciplinary collaborative artwork, Բաժակ Նայող (One Who Looks at the Cup), explores community dataset creation and has been presented at REDCAT for Getty PST, Music Center LA, and the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan. With Meldia Yesayan, she is the co-curator of Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI at OXY ARTS (2021), which traveled to the Ford Foundation Gallery under the title, What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI (2023). https://mashinkafirunts.com
Nancy Kricorian, who was born and raised in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and is the author of four novels about post-genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including Zabelle, which was translated into seven languages, was adapted as a play, and has been continuously in print since 1998. Her latest novel The Burning Heart of the World is focused on Armenians of Beirut before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review, Mizna, The Markaz Review, Witness, and other journals. She has taught at Barnard, Columbia, Yale, and New York University, as well as with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in the New York City Public Schools. Kricorian has also been a literary mentor with We Are Not Numbers since 2015. She has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Gold Medal from the Writers Union of Armenia, and the Anahid Literary Award, among other honors. She lives in New York City.
Ara Oshagan is a diasporic multi-disciplinary artist and curator whose practice explores collective and personal histories of dispossession, legacies of violence, identity, de-colonization and (un)imagined futures. Oshagan works in photography, collage, installation, film, book arts, public art and monuments and has published four books of photography. He has had solo exhibitions and public art installations in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Armenia, Morocco, and South Korea. His work has been featured on NPR, LA Times, Hyperallergic, Mother Jones, Art Papers among others. He has been designated as a “100 Leading Global Thinkers” by Foreign Policy Magazine in DC and a “Cultural Trailblazer” by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Oshagan is an Artist-in-Residence at the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica and curator at the City of Glendale ReflectSpace Gallery.
