Film & Visual Art

Little Amal ART

Amal Walks Across America

August 3, 2023

Little Amal, whose name means “hope” in Arabic, is an internationally celebrated 12-foot-tall puppet of a 10-year-old Syrian refugee girl. She has been welcomed by more than 250 uniquely created artistic events across the globe since her initial 5,000-mile trek across Europe in 2021. Amal carries her message of hope for marginalized people everywhere, especially children who have been separated from their families. As a public art project, among the largest ever produced, she has been heralded as “one of the most ambitious live artworks ever staged” (The Observer, 2021) and “an...

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Mouhanad Al Rifay

Q&A With Mouhanad Al Rifay

April 26, 2021

CMES AM candidate Mouhanad Al Rifay is a Syrian-American award-winning documentary filmmaker, humanitarian, and human rights activist. At CMES he is focused on journalism and nonfiction narrative writing and developing further expertise in Middle East–focused critical political and cultural commentary. After graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2014 with a BA in Psychology, International Development, and Conflict Management, Al Rifay managed various USAID-funded programs at leading international development organizations in Washington, DC. He also co-founded...

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Karagoz puppets

Video: 'Trauma, Magic, Love': a tribute to Osman Kavala on his birthday

October 2, 2019

On September 16, CMES welcomed Syrian-Armenian-American stage and film actress Sona Tatoyan and artist and puppet master Ayhan Hülagü to speak about finding her Armenian grandfather's Karagöz puppets in the abandoned family home in Aleppo, Syria. Ayhan then presented some of Sona's family's puppets in a short puppet show to close the event. For more on Sona and Ayhan and the event: https://bit.ly/2potIVR.

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Cola anyone

Photo Gallery: 2017-18 Harvard College International Photo Contest

August 13, 2018

CMES awarded a first prize and two honorable mentions in the 2017–18 Harvard College International Photo Contest for photos taken in the Middle East region. All photos were from students’ internships, language study, and travel in the summer of 2017. First place went to Portia Berry-Kilby ('20), a NELC concentrator, focusing on Arabic and the Modern Middle East. The photo was taken while she attended Yale's Summer Study Abroad program in Morocco where she studied Arabic for the summer with the...

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HAM qajar album

Mobile Images from 19th-Century Iran

October 13, 2017

A rare album of artists’ drawings, preparatory sketches, and more helped shape a Harvard Art Museums exhibition about art in 19th-century Iran, co-curated by McWilliams, Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art at the Harvard Art Museums, and CMES Steering Committee member David Roxburgh, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Islamic Art History and chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Read more about the exhibition and related publications in HAM's...

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Kami Choi Jordan

Photo Gallery: 2016-17 Harvard College International Photo Contest

May 17, 2017

CMES awarded a first prize and three honorable mentions in the 2016–17 Harvard College International Photo Contest for photos taken in the Middle East region. All photos were from students’ internships, language study, and travel in the summer of 2016. This year’s first prize went to Kami Choi (’17), a senior at the college pursuing a joint concentration in Government and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Choi interned at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency headquarters in Amman, Jordan while...

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CMES presentation poster

Nostalgia, Memory, Place: Margaux Fitoussi on the Hara of Tunis

May 12, 2017

In summer 2016, Margaux Fitoussi, an MTS candidate at Harvard Divinity School, curated a multimedia exhibition in Tunis about the Hara, the city’s historic Jewish neighborhood, centered around a collection of photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In November at CMES, she assembled a smaller version of the exhibition, premiered EL HARA, a short documentary film about the Hara co-directed with her friend Mo Scarpelli and featuring an interview with the celebrated writer Albert Memmi, and gave a talk about the original exhibition in Tunis and viewers’ reactions to it.... Read more about Nostalgia, Memory, Place: Margaux Fitoussi on the Hara of Tunis