Habiba Boumlik, the founder and co-curator of NYFAF, is professor at CUNY LaGuardia Community College and a scholar of Amazigh cinema. Her original aim was to bring visibility to the Amazigh communities and cultures in North Africa and the diaspora through films. NYFAF has now grown from bridging encounters between LaGuardia students, filmmakers, scholars, artists and the large New York City audiences, to creating a space for transnational Amazigh voices to connect through film.  

Professor Boumlik has presented her research at national and international conferences. Her presentations have explored themes of diasporic Amazigh film, transnational identities, and the role of film festivals in preserving cultural heritage.

Her recent publications on Amazigh cinema include: "Global Trajectories, Localized Stories: Amazigh Filmmaking through the Eyes of Selected Filmmakers" in Amazigh Cinema: An Introduction to North African Indigenous Film (2025); "Journeys of Discovery: The Case of the New York Forum of Amazigh Film" in African Film Festivals and Transnational Flows of Living Cultural Heritage (2025); and "Indigeneity and Identity Transmission: Amazigh Cultural Expression through Film" in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture (2023). 

Through her scholarship and curatorial role, Professor Boumlik continues to advocate for Amazigh cinematic production and the recognition of Amazigh cinema, a vital form of cultural preservation. 

Dr. Lucy R. McNair is a translator and Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, The City University of New York, where she co-leads a faculty seminar on Language Across the Curriculum and co-curates the New York Forum of Amazigh Film. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a M.A. in Modern Languages. Her literary translations and scholarship focus on francophone North Africa and its diaspora, including Amazigh literature and film. Her literary translations include Mouloud Feraoun’s Algerian classic, The Poor Man’s Son (University of Virginia Press, 2005), Moroccan writer Edmond Amran El Maleh’s short story, “Taksiat,” (Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four, University of California Press, 2012), and poetry by Andrée Chedid, Venus Khoury-Ghata and Amina Said (The Poetry of Arab Women, Interlink Publishing Group, 2000). She contributed translations to SOUFFLES-ANFAS: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Lamalif: A Critical Anthology of Societal Debates in Morocco during the Years of Lead (1966-1988), (Liverpool University Press, 2023). Her articles appear in Jaddaliyya, Language, Culture and Curriculum, and Journal of North African Studies.

Dr. Wafa Bahri received her Ph.D. in Linguistics (Sociolinguistics) from The Graduate Center-CUNY and her MA in Applied Linguistics from the Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. She joined the faculty of the Modern Language Department at The University of Colorado Denver in 2020, where she teaches Linguistics Courses.  Her primary research focuses on the documentation and description of Tunisian Tamazight and the discursive display of Tamazight language and identity on Social Networking Sites (SNS). Her additional interests focus on language and gender, language and identity, and endangered languages. Her recent publication is a co-edited volume: Digital orality: vernacular writing in online spaces (Palgrave) and she has a forthcoming chapter on Amazigh activism in film.  She is also an editor of the Journal of Amazigh Studies (JAS) and a regular contributor to the Amazigh Voice newsletter. 

Dr. Yahya Laayouni is an Associate Professor at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the complexity of identity formation in “French” films of children of North African origins living in France. He is interested in questions of religion, gender and sexuality in film. He is also interested in topics related to alterity and postcolonial subjectivity. A list of selected publication include a recent article published on Jadaliyya on Amazigh cinema, an article in the Journal of Religion and Film: "From Marseille to Mecca: Reconciling the Secular and the Religious in Le grand voyage (The Big Trip) (2004)," several several film reviews in The French Review Journal such as Nabil Ayouch's Much Loved, Hicham Lasri's C'est eux les chiens, Boris Lojkin's Hope and Danielle Arbid's Peur de rien. He has also published a review of Djemaa Maazouzi's book Le partage des mémoires: la guerre d’Algérie en littérature, au cinéma et sur le web.