Virtual Gallery Advisory Board:

Virtual Gallery Coordinator: Jessica Winegar
jwinegar@arteeast.org

Aissa Deebi
Aissa Deebi is a Haifa-born artist and curator. He is a graduate of the Art Department of the University of Haifa (1995) and holds an M.F.A from Liverpool University in the U.K. He currently resides in New York. His artwork has been shown in galleries and museum in Israel-Palestine, Austria, Germany, USA and the U.K. Deebi has curated and published numerous critical reviews in Palestinian media as well as exhibition catalogues in the Middle East and Europe.

Salah Hassan
Salah Hassan is Chair of the Department of History of Art and associate professor of
African an African Diaspora art history and visual culture at Africana Studies at Cornell University. He is also a curator and art critic. He is founder and editor of NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and serves as consulting editor for African Arts and Atlantica. Hassan has authored and edited several books including: Unpacking Europe (2001); Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art (2001); Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists (1997); and Art and Islamic Literacy Among the Hausa of Northern Nigeria (1992. Hassan also served as guest curator of several exhibitions including: “Authentic/Ex-Centric” at the 49th Venice Biennale; “Unpacking Europe” at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam; “Self and Other” at Apex Art Gallery in New York; “Modernit(ies) and Memor(ies)” at the 1997 Venice Biennale; “and Visions of a Sudanese Diaspora at the First Johannesburg Biennale” in 1995.

Melissa Hibbard
Melissa Hibbard is a photographer and filmmaker. She earned her BA in Moving Image Arts in 1996 from the College of Santa Fe where she studied documentary filmmaking. Upon graduation, she moved to Los Angeles and worked in the film industry as an art director on feature films for five years. She has produced three documentaries on video. BREAKING BREAD (2000) and SIR ALFRED OF CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT (2001) have been well received by the media and worldwide audiences. SHAHRBANOO (2002) first premiered on PBS station WNET where it received among the highest ratings for an independently produced documentary. In 2003, she co-established a non-profit organization – ARTEEAST - its mission statement to promote the arts and cultures of the Middle East and it’s worldwide Diaspora in the United States. She works as the editor of ArteEast’s monthly on-line newsletter, ARTENEWS. She now works and resides in both New York City and Tehran, Iran.

Munir Jiwa
Munir Jiwa writes and lectures widely on Islam and Muslims in the West, art, aesthetics, gender, media, identity, representation, and postcolonialism.  He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia
University, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Aga Khan Program at MIT, and at the University of Toronto.  Jiwa has also worked extensively with the United Nation’s Religions for Peace interfaith youth programs in Bosnia, Japan, Middle East and West Africa.  Since 1998, he has been a researcher with the Ford-funded Muslims in New York City Project.  He is currently completing several publications on Islam and cultural production.

Hamid Rahmanian
Hamid Rahmanian is a filmmaker and graphic designer. He holds a B.F.A. from the University of Tehran in Graphic Design and earned a M.F.A. in Computer Animation in 1997 from Pratt Institute. He received “The First Place College Award” (a student Emmy) from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and was nominated for a Student Academy Award for his animation, THE SEVENTH DAY, among other awards in 1997. His first 35 mm film, a 19 minute experimental short, AN I WITHIN, received Kodak’s "Best Cinematography Award" and “Best American Short” from the LA Int’l Short Film Festival. Mr. Rahmanian has made three documentaries on video: BREAKING BREAD (2000), SIR ALFRED OF CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT (2001) and SHAHRBANOO (2002), all of which have been well received by the media and worldwide audiences. In 2003, Mr. Rahmanian co-established ARTEEAST. He works as the curator of film programs for Cinema East, which is now in its 3rd season. He is currently working on a feature film project in Iran entitled, “Day Break”.

Kirsten Scheid
Kirsten Scheid is a Beirut-based anthropologist and art historian who writes regularly on modern and contemporary art in the Middle East.  Her research interests include the history of painting in Lebanon, cross-cultural investments in fine art, and the use of art for negotiating ambiguous social identities such as gender and class.  She has taught at the American University of Beirut and is completing her Ph.D. at Princeton University. Kirsten combines her academic interests with local cultural engagements in her capacity as the coordinator for a series of Arabic children’s books, as a member of the editorial board of the Arabic bi-monthly political cultural review Al-Adab, and as an activist for popular movements to invest in local economic and cultural resources in the face of dispossessing globalization.  In 2001, Kirsten helped co-found a cultural facilities center accessible to Beirut’s lower class and refugees.  At this center she curated Women at an Exhibition, showing 4 generations of local women painters painting women; she also helped formulate a ground-breaking exhibition and conference on censorship and its resistance in the Arab world.  In 1992-3 Kirsten conducted independent field research on the contemporary Palestinian painting movement in the West Bank.

Jessica Winegar
Jessica Winegar is an anthropologist whose work focuses on art and the culture industries in the Middle East.  She is currently writing a book on the visual art world in Egypt, on which she has also published and lectured widely.  She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a National Endowmen for the Humanities grant.  She is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University in New York.