Bilge Ebiri reviews movies for New York magazine and has written about film for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, and The Film Journal, among others. His first feature film, New Guy, completed in 2003, is currently playing on the festival circuit.

Mona Eltahawy is managing editor of Arabic Women's eNews. She has been a journalist for 13 years, five of them based in Cairo and Jerusalem as a correspondent for Reuters news agency. She has also reported from the Middle East for The Guardian newspaper and U.S. News & World Report. Her commentaries and editorials have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune.

Anahid Kassabian is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, where she also serves on the program faculties in Literary Studies and Women's Studies. She has published widely on Armenian diasporan filmmaking, popular music, and Hollywood film music, including Hearing Film (2001), with David Kazanjian. Kassabian has co-curated Armenian film festivals in New York and San Francisco.

Mazyar Lotfalian is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. Dr. Lotfalian has conducted research on Muslim scientists and engineers in Iran, Malaysia, and the United States. His forthcoming book, Islam, Technoscientific Identities, and the Culture of Curiosity (University Press of America), is an account of the effect of the Islamic resurgence on the understanding of science and technology in the modern world. His earlier work includes studies of online communities, and he has maintained an interest in distance learning and online interaction. He has published widely in academic volumes such as the Late Editions series (University of Chicago Press) and such journals as Ethos and Cultural Dynamics.

Kamran Rastegar is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, where he studies modern cultural productions of Iran and the Arab world. His interests focus on post-war cinema in Iran, and he has served as the initial organizer of the conference Iranian Cinema: Two Decades and a Century, held at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2002. Currently, he is engaged in research on 19th- and early 20th-century literary and visual cultures.

Carole Woodall has lived, traveled extensively, and conducted research in Istanbul where she received an MA in Turkish history from Bogazici University. Presently she is a doctoral candidate in the joint Middle East Studies/History program at New York University. Her research explores the cultural landscape of 1920s Istanbul by focusing on issues of public dancing, drinking, fashion and going to the cinema.