What I’ve done
Performance & presentations, features & interviews (scroll), speaking engagements (scroll more), writing (scroll!), etc.
Performance & Presentations
Times Square, New York City, 2022
All at once an art installation and performance piece, this intimate portrayal of love and loss as consequences of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan performed by US veterans and artists of Middle Eastern descent. A production in partnership with Poetic Theater Productions and military veteran poet and performance artist Nicole Goodwin aka GOODW.Y.N.
Ghost of Myself and You:
a devised performance
New York Public Library, 2021
Contemporary women artists and writers celebrate the collection, The Mirror of My Heart through readings, music, and a discussion about carrying forward this terrific lineage of poetic thinking.
A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry By Women: Readings, Music and Conversation
Toronto Queer Film Festival, 2021
Khuda Bowad Yarat/When I Am No Longer Here is a video recreation and reconciliation with queer mortality.
Intimate Conflicts: Queer Lives in Times of War
British International Studies Conference, 2021
Conflicts become perpetual realities in the lives of those displaced, exiled, racialized, minoritized, queer and trans across different borders, societies, times and spaces. How do minoritized individuals across different borders and boundaries experience ‘intimate conflicts’? The artists, activists and scholars on this roundtable will shares their poetry, art work, narratives and scholarships exploring these inquiries through an intimate, collective, queer and feminist conversation.
International Journal of Feminist Politics Journal Conference, 2021
What are queer conflicts? How do queer and trans individuals experience conflicts? This panel extends the meaning of conflict beyond political violence to include internal conflict of queer individuals. We also consider conflict over sexual orientation and state/religion/society, the tension between Islamophobia and queerphobia, the move between the category of the homosexual and the terrorist, and the constructed binary of the violent masculine/effeminate homosexual.
Khuda Bowad Yaret: When I’m No Longer Here, Poetics and Politics of Queer Conflicts Roundtable
Ke marge bekhabar dara judaye; when I'm no longer here
Apparitions Online Exhibition, 2020
Informed by a diasporic framework and Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, APPARITIONS emphasizes the sensory; disconnection from body, land, heritage, ancestors, and history; and repressed history and memory.
Reimagining Queer Futures: Afghans and Art in the Diaspora
Afghan American Artists and Writers (AAWA), 2020
Panel discussion featuring activists, writers, and artists on how creativity and the arts are being mobilized by the LGBTQ Afghan diaspora as a form of resistance and community-building.
Inna lillahi wa inna illahi rajiun, Where Will I Be Buried
Flux Factory, NY, 2020
Where will I be buried*?* holds space for artists and audiences from marginalized communities to center ourselves in our mourning, healing and transformations. For QTBIPOC communities the question of where “will I be buried” is not easily answered. How we approach ritual, ceremony and death varies from culture to culture, religion to religion and even more so depending on your gender or sexual identity. Using death as an entry point the included artists bring dynamic responses to the titular question exploring pleasure, pain, longing and transcendence.
Inna lillahi wa inna illahi raji'un, EmergeNYC 2020 presents: Works in Progress
Abrons Center, NY, 2020
Ahesto Boro, YKR 5: Decoded
Dixon Place, NY, 2019
YKR is a transformational storytelling project featuring artists of South Asian and Indo-Caribbean heritage.
Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love
born in New York, NY - shared nationally, Present - 2011
Features & Interviews
May 2024 / Wazina Zondon on “Nonchalant” Sex Education and Trusting Our Desires, Them
June 2020 / All Kinds of Love & Pride Notes Campaign, Reebok
All Types of Love is a physical representation of all the ways to love and be loved and the need for human connection. Proud Notes provides a platform for authentic, passionate individuals to share their unique stories and journeys as they are celebrated through notes written by loved ones
February 2020 / M-Train Podcast, Episode 1, Ahmed Ali Akbar and Shirin Barghi
A six-part series exploring different facets of Muslim life, culture and diversity in NYC
August 2019 / Champions of Pride, Advocate Magazine
May 2019 / Tell Them, I Am, episode 6, KPCC and Misha Euceph
Month-long series during Ramadan, featuring known and well-known Muslim-Americans about the small moments in their lives that define who they are are not
January - April 2019 / Secret Life of Muslims, Season 2, Smartypants
Web-based short-form video series offering perspective from a wide-range and diverse set of Muslims
June 2018 / 100 Women We Love: Class of 2018, GO Magazine
May 2018 / Can You Be Religious & Queer?, them.
Video feature with three queer believers - Catholic, Jewish and Muslim - who have reconciled their queer identity with their faith
August 2018 / Muslims of Brooklyn Oral History Project, The Center for Brooklyn History
Multi-year public arts and history project to amplify stories of Brooklyn’s diverse Muslim communities
June 2018 / Being Queer & Muslim is Possible, HuffPost Perspectives
Multi-part series on often unexpected or unheard identities
July 2017 / Extreme(ly Queer) Muslims, Episode 4, Dylan Marron and Seriously TV
Highlighting queer Muslim voices throughout pride month and Ramadan
June 2013 / The Out List, HBO with Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Documentary about being among the LGBT community in modern society, told through interviews with LGBT celebrities and community leaders
Speaking Engagements
September 2021 / South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), New York, NY
Khutbah and reflection on the 20 years after 9/11
April 2017 / TEDxNYU, New York, NY
Breaking into Unconventional Spaces
November 2016 / Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, CA
Coming Out Muslim: Reflections and Observations of an American Insider-Outsider, part of Iris Nights Series in conjunction with featured exhibit, IDENTITY: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ The List Portraits
February 2017 / University of California Riverside, Pomona College, and Harvey Mudd
Speaker series on issues related to identity, islamophobia and queerness
April 2014 / University of Minnesota
Keynote at the Women of Color Student Conference
Writing
Spring 2022 / Collective Love Print, Transnational Embodiments: Special Edition Journal in collaboration with AWID and Kohl
Co-authored with The Conspiracy of Writers
Fall 2021 / When I Am No Longer Here: A Feminist Collaborative Autoethnography of Queer Muslim Death and Burials, Kohl: A Journal of Body and Gender Research Vol. 7 No. 1
Co-authored with Dr. Ahmad Qais Munhazim
Fall 2021 / Fuck the Fucking Lines: A Provocation for Disquiet in the Academy, Kohl: A Journal of Body and Gender Research Vol. 7 No. 1
Co-authored with The Circle’s Conspiracy of Writers
November 2019 / Radical Acts of Existence, Esquire Singapore Feature article for “Believe in Something” issue
November 2019 / Father Tongue, Fragmented Futures: Afghanistan 100 Years Later, Afghan American Artists & Writers Association
March 2019 / Islam Helped Me Find My Path As a Queer Sex Educator, VICE/Broadly
In collaboration with writer Leila Ettachfini
January 2018/ Queer + Muslim = Possible, Reaching Out: LGBTQ stories of faith lost & found