Aquí Seguimos
Artist Talk
Featuring
Ismail Khalidi & Edgar Reyes
Supported by the Institute for Palestine Studies
Join Chile-based Palestinian playwright and screenwriter Ismail Khalidi and local Mexican multimedia artist and professor Edgar Reyes in conversation with Aquí Seguimos curators, Alana Guzman and Marah Abdel Jaber. Together, they’ll examine the role of art in the national consciousness of Palestinian and LatinX communities and the necessity for radical imagination in the face of unending devastation.
DONATE TO RSVP
SPEAKERS
ISMAIL KHALIDI
Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian American playwright and director. His plays include Tennis in Nablus (Alliance Theatre), Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater), Foot (Teatro Amal), Sabra Falling (Pangea World Theater), Dead Are My People (Noor Theatre), and The Magic Bullet (co-writer, Lub Dub).
Khalidi has co-authored three plays with Naomi Wallace, including adaptations of Ghassan Kanafani's Returning to Haifa (Finborough Theatre) and Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer (Actors Theatre of Louisville), as well as the original one-act, Visions from the Center of the Earth (Ashtar Theatre). His work has been published in numerous anthologies, including Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi (Mathuen/Bloomsbury) and Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG), which he co-edited. Khalidi's other writing has been published in the Kenyon Review, American Theatre, Al-Jazeera, Remezcla and Mizna. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and has been a past artist-in-residence at Teatro Amal (Chile), Mizna, and Boston University's Center on Forced Displacement. He is currently a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.
EDGAR REYES
Edgar Reyes (b. Guadalajara, Mexico) is a multimedia artist and professor. Reyes’s work invites viewers to think about the people, places, and connections they carry with them. His practice draws on the specifics of his own life, and reflections of shared experiences of resettlement and migration. Through his art making he explores his family’s Mexican and Indigenous roots.
ALANA GUZMÁN
Alana Guzmán is a Mexican oil painter, born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and now based in Washington, DC. Drawing from her cultural roots and immigrant experience, her work delves into the emotional tension between beauty and brutality, survival and surrender. Through vivid color and dynamic movement, she creates paintings that hold space for the contradictions and complexities of being alive.
MARAH ABDEL JABER
Marah Abdel Jaber is a Palestinian writer, researcher, and creative. Her work focuses on constructions of the Palestinian nation, literature, agriculture, and imaginative movements. She holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago and is a Fellow of the Institute for Palestine Studies.