Awards

Dr. Dina Al-Kassim is a critical theorist, who works on political subjectivation, sexuality and aesthetics in transnational modernist and contemporary postcolonial cultures, including the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the United States. She is the author of On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant (University of California Press, 2010), which examines parrhesia and the politics of address in the practice of literary ranting. Al-Kassim’s publications have appeared in Grey Room, International Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Public Culture, Cultural Dynamics, and the volume Islamicate Sexualities. Her current project, entitled Exposures: Biopolitics and New Precarity under Globalization asks why and how exposure has come to be a condition of contemporary truth through selective soundings in literature, arts practice, protest and politics from Lebanon, South Africa, and the United States. Other projects include discrepant histories of colonial psychoanalysis and theories of anti-colonial solidarity.

Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at UC Irvine, Al-Kassim now teaches in the Department of English and The Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where she is also an Associate at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.  Al-Kassim has been a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, a Senior Seminar Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, and a Sawyer Seminar, Residency Fellow at the UCHRI. A much invited speaker here and abroad, Al-Kassim now divides her time between Vancouver and Los Angeles.

Kent Donguines is a Filipino-Canadian narrative and documentary filmmaker based in Vancouver, BC. He is the CEO of Aimer Films Inc. and has produced the award-winning CBC short documentary, This Ink Runs Deep, which premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. He also wrote, directed, and produced the Telus Storyhive short film Kalinga (Care), a documentary about the sacrifices Filipina nannies make to work in Canada. The short documentary had its World Premiere at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival and won the Kathleen Shannon Award from Yorkton Film Festival. Kent has worked for production companies in Canada and the Philippines, including Cedar Island Films Inc., Black Cap Pictures (Ten17p), Viva Entertainment, and Star Cinema. His latest short film, funded by Harold Greenberg Fund, BC Arts Council, Canadian Film Centre, CreativeBC, and the National Film Board of Canada, PACO received the Grand Prize in Stage32 Annual Film Contest and has secured a broadcast license with CRAVE. He’s currently developing the feature film, Cross-Country Baby, and his feature documentaries, Treasure of the Rice Terraces and Canadian Adobo.

Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker and artist whose work draws on her interest in the relational, the sonic and the diasporic. Her films include Sister Mother Lover Child, Echolocation, Amal's Garden and the feature documentary Jaddoland, which was awarded 5 festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit "Truer than Fiction" Award in 2020 and went on to broadcast for three seasons on US public television. Her work has shown in festivals which include Cinema du Réel, Images Festival, DOXA, BlackStar, Camden, Mimesis, Kassel Dokfest, New Orleans Film Festival and Cairo International Film Festival, among others. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Turkey, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and her work as an artist is preceded by a decade of work as a community practitioner and affordable housing advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq and Yemen and is currently an Assistant Professor in Film in the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.