Dr. Sheila Petty

Sheila Petty is professor of media studies and SaskPower Research Chair in Cultural Heritage at the University of Regina. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has written extensively on issues of cultural representation, identity and nation in African and African diasporic screen media, and has curated film, television and digital media exhibitions for art galleries across Canada. She is author of Contact Zones: Memory, Origin and Discourses in Black Diasporic Cinema, and co-editor of the Directory of World Cinema: Africa. Her research program focuses on manifestations of cultural heritage in screen media, especially sub-Saharan African, North African and Amazigh cinemas. Her latest project, funded through New Frontiers in Research Fund, investigates methodologies for decolonizing film festival research in a post-pandemic world. She is currently completing a book on Algerian feminist filmmaker, Habiba Djahnine (Edinburgh University Press).

Dr. Daniela Merolla

Daniela Merolla is a Professor in Amazigh / Berber Literature and Art at the INALCO, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Sorbonne Paris-Cité). She taught and did research in African Literatures and Media at Leiden University (NL) until 2015.  The theoretical and methodological approach of her research is interdisciplinary, at the crossroads between comparative literature studies, new media, and anthropology. This approach is complementary to her specialization in Berber literature and her fieldwork in the Aurès and Kabylia (Algeria), in the Rif and Sous (Morocco), as well as in the Amazigh/Berber diaspora in France and the Netherlands. Investigating intertextuality and multilingualism in African oral and written literature, cinema, and websites, she developed the notion of “Amazigh / Berber literary and cinematographic space.”

Dr. Fazia Aitel

Fazia Aitel is an Associate Professor of French and post-colonial studies at Claremont McKenna College in California. Her areas of Expertise are African Literature, French language and Literature and immigration. Her research examines the representation of the Amazigh people in contemporary Algerian fiction. While in New York, Fazia Aitel continued to advocate for the Imazighen people, and she spoke twice at the United Nations on their behalf. Her most recent book is We Are Imazighen: The Development of Algerian Berber Identity in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture, published in 2014.

Dr. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman

Bruce Maddy-Weitzman is an Associate Professor,  Dept. of Middle Eastern and African History, and Senior Research Fellow, The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University. He is also an Associate Scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a Contributing Editor, The Jerusalem Report. He has written extensively on North Africa and on the Imazighen including: The Berber 
Identity  Movement and the Challenge to North African States (2011).

Dr. Nabil Boudraa

Nabil Boudraa is an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Oregon State University. He received an MA from the CUNY Graduate Center and has gone on to publish on a range of topics related to the francophone world and North African cultures. His books include Francophone Cultures through Film (2013) and Algeria on Screen: The Films of Merzak Allouache (2018).