Americanish

Aizzah Fatima is an actress and writer from New York City by way of Mississippi. After training as a Microbiologist and working as an ads engineer at Google, she traded in her Google perks for the arts, and hasn’t looked back. Aizzah is a graudate of the conservatory at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and studied acting with the acclaimed Wynn Handman. Aizzah has appeared on High Maintenance (HBO), The Good Wife (CBS), Patrice O’Neal’s Guide to White People (Comedy Central), opposite Annette O’Toole in the short film Stuff, and is currently filming the lead role in the feature film My Cousin Sister’s Wedding for which she wrote the screenplay with Emmy award winning director Iman Zawahry. She is the writer and performer of the ciritically acclaimed comedy one woman play Dirty Paki Lingerie which was developed with Matt Hoverman and Wynn Handman. The play has had sold out performances and received rave reviews in The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, NYC (The Flea Theater, 59E59, Abington Theater), Toronto (Harbourfront Center), a tour in Pakistan sponsored by the US Department of State, three tours in the UK including a 15 city tour in 2016 in addition to a US College Tour. Dirty Paki Lingerie is the first play to be invited to represent the United States at the International Theater Festival of Turkmenistan. The Wall Street Journal hailed it the play that “Breaks down stereotypes of Muslim women in America” and critics called it a “must-see” production. The play has been nominated for a Broadway World award and a Manchester Theatre Award in the UK.

Dr. Dalia Fahmy is an assistant professor of Political Science at Long Island University where she teaches courses on US foreign Policy, World Politics, International Relations, Causes of War, and Politics of the Middle East. Dr. Fahmy‘s current research looks at the changing role of Islamists in the democratic future of the Middle East. She has published several articles in academic journals focusing on democratization and most recently on the effects of Islamophobia on US foreign policy and been interviewed by and written op eds for various media outlets including ABC, CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, the Huffington Post, and appears often on Aljazeera. Dr. Fahmy has won several academic awards and fellowships for her research. In 2014, she was one of the recipients of the prestigious Kleigman Prize in Political Science. This year she was awarded the Newton Prize for excellence.

Iman Zawahry is one of the first hijabi American-Muslim filmmakers in the nation. She has worked on numerous films that have played at over 100 venues worldwide. Zawahry has worked as a producer on the feature film Paperback with Moonlight producer Adele Romanski and Sundance alum Adam Bowers. Her short film Tough Crowd won an Emmy Award and qualified her as a finalist in the NBC Comedy Short Cuts to pitch a sitcom with NBC executives. She is the recipient of the coveted Princess Grace Award for her film Undercover and was selected as a Lincoln Center New York Film Festival Artist Academy Fellow in 2015. Zawahry also collaborated with the non-profit Islamic Scholarship Fund to create the first-ever American Muslim film grant where she currently serves as director. Zawahry works to amplify the underrepresented female voice. She wrote and directed her debut feature film, Americanish, with a majority female crew. The film won the Audience Award at CAAMFest in San Francisco. She currently is a professor of film production at the University of Florida.

Dr. Maytha Alhassen primarily sees her labor as that of a freedom doula and an engaged wit/h/ness reviving the traditions of the feral femme. She is a historian, journalist, poet, organizer and mending practitioner. As a journalist, she worked as an on-air host for Al Jazeera English and The Young Turks, also field reporting for such outlets as CNN, Huffington Post, Mic, and the Boston Review. In 2017 she received her Ph.D. in American studies and Ethnicity from USC and gave a TED talk on her ancestral relationship to Syria as part of TED Residency. As a scholar, she co-edited a book on the Arab uprisings, Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions and wrote Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and How to Transform Them for her Pop Culture Collaborative Senior Fellowship. Alhassen has co-founded multiple social justice organizations including Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, the Social Justice Institute at Occidental College, Believers Bail Out (a Muslim abolition group), and in the wake of George Floyd’s brutal murder, the Arabs for Black Lives collective. Currently, Alhassen writes for Hulu series Ramy, is an Associate Professor in Social Justice and Community Organizing at Prescott college, advises on social impact campaigns and does educational consulting, offers yoga, meditation and reiki workshops and trying to find time to write some books and show treatments.

Roy Wol is a NY Based Spanish-Middle Eastern-Latino-Jewish Producer/Writer/Director and a 2022 Cannes Producers Network fellow. He continuously serves as a South by Southwest Film Producing mentor, and holds the coveted Producers Guild of America mark. He is also a two-time Independent Filmmaker Project (The Gotham) fellow for episodic and narrative labs, and a 2021 European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs (EAVE) fellowship recipient (Luxembourg, France, Spain). Roy is a Third-Culture Kid (TCK) and a serial immigrant who’s lived in Turkey, Argentina, Spain, Israel, Canada, and the USA. He’s currently based in New York City, running the critically acclaimed production company Studio Autonomous. He’s an intersectionality advocate and has dedicated his life to elevating underrepresented communities while also serving at as a board member of Hollywood Radio & Tv Society. His critically acclaimed feature film The Garden Left Behind won [Audience Award] at SXSW and was named as one of the top 40 best LGBTQ films of all time by Rotten Tomatoes. The film provided jobs to 48 people from the transgender community and was selected as a case study by Film Independent, LA at the 2020 Film Forum. Americanish won the 2021 Grand Jury prize at Heartland, CAAMFest, Asian American International, and the New York Asian Film Festival and is the first American-Muslim rom-com directed by an American-Muslim Hijabi woman, Iman Zawahry. Autom Reign (a Gotham Lab project) is based on Doppelbänger (Fantasia Film Festival) and available on Gunpowder&Sky’s DUST Network by Emmy-nominated Sundance alumni Sofian Khan and Academy nominee Milcho Manchevski’s Bikini Moon with an all-star cast.