Current

Films

The Painter of Rust, 2025 (in festival submissions)

You can check out a short excerpt here.

_{Screening at Abdul Hameed Shoman center in Amman, Jordan}

In this 40-minute documentary portrait, we spend time with acclaimed Jordanian painter and intellectual, Hani Hourani, who reflects on his youth, his life as an artist, and his creative practice that straddles the line between realism and abstraction. Central to the film, and perhaps surprisingly so, is his early involvement in fostering the seeds of a new Arab cinema, something his peers were very much interested in creating, one that would reflect their realities. While he did not continue his involvement with cinema, the connection between his own artistic tendencies and the questions about cinematic form that he and his peers were asking is clear. My film tries to examine Hani the artist through images, those he creates and those in which he is the subject. It raises the question of how we can come to know a person through the surface of the image, one that, for Hani, is intimately tied to place – to Amman, and the people within it, even if they are a present absence in his paintings.

Publications

Editor: Palgrave Handbook of Arab Film and Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)

Chapter: “Invoking the Shadow Archive” in anthology Streaming Video in the Global South, ed. Shakti Jaising and Hadi Gharabaghi (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Essay: “History and Memory in Filmic Landscapes”

…. for Landscape Panel, Film Commission Conference of KSA, 2024

Chapter: “Found Footage as Counter Ethnography in Scenes from the Occupation of Gaza and the Films of Basma Alsharif”, in Gaza on Screen, ed. by Nadia Yaqub (Duke University Press, 2023)

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Global Horror: Hybridity and Alterity in Transnational Horror Film  

Edited and co-authored an anthology text book about global horror cinema (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2022). Composed of 14 chapters, each by a different author, this book offers scholars and students of horror film an opportunity to see the longer history of decolonial and indigenous contributions to the field.