Biographies: CinemaEast Jury:
MEVLUT AKKAYA
Mevlut Akkaya taught acting at Duisburg International Center in Germany from 1990 to 1992. He also produced, wrote and directed the play Manwolf, which premiered in 1992 at the Tribeca Lab Theater in New York City. His short film, A Jazz Story, has been screened at the New York International Independent Film Festival, Kino Film Festival in Manchester and Oceanside Film Festival in California. Mr. Akkaya was recently invited to LA International Short Film Festival and AFI Fest 2001 with his last film Kanake. In 2001 with his partner Patrick DiRenna, Mr. Akkaya started the Digital Film Center. Mr. Akkaya also serves as the artistic director of the Moon and Stars Project, and has been curating the Annual New York Turkish Film Festival for five years.

AMMIEL ALCALAY
Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, translator, critic and scholar. He teaches in the department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures and in the Medieval Studies Program and Comparative Literature department at the CUNY Graduate Center. His latest work, From the Warring Factions (2002), is a book-length poem dedicated to the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. "Poetry, Politics & Translation: American Isolation and the Middle East," a lecture given at Cornell, was published in 2003 by Palm Press. His other books include After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1993), The Cairo Notebooks (1993), and Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (1999). He has also translated widely, including Sarajevo Blues by the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic (1998), and Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (1996). Current projects include translation of a new book by Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Nine Alexandrias, due out in Fall, 2003; a Hebrew novel, Outcast, by Shimon Ballas, and a book of essays, Politics & Imagination.

NANA ASFOUR
Nana Asfour is a freelance writer who has written extensively about the Middle East and Arab cinema. Her articles have appeared in Time Out New York, Cineaste, the New York Times and ARTnews.

LEILI KASHANI
Leili Kashani is a doctoral student in the Department of Middle East Studies at New York University, where she works on modern Iranian history and culture. She has contributed to articles about Iranian film, and is currently reviewing a book about Iranian cinema for the Arab Studies Journal.

ANTHONY KAUFMAN
Anthony Kaufman is a film writer and teacher. He regularly contributes to indieWIRE, RES, the Village Voice, and Time Out New York, and teaches film studies at Adelphi University. He is also the editor of Steven Soderbergh: Interviews.

DAVID KAZANJIAN
David Kazanjian is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and Associate Director of Women's Studies, the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has edited, with David L. Eng, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (University of California Press, 2003), and is the author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial
Citizenship in Early America (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). He has also written, with Anahid Kassabian, on films of the Armenian diaspora.