Ala Younis (head of program)
Ala Younis is an artist with curatorial, film and publishing projects. Younis’s projects look into the archive’s play on predilections and how its lacunas and mishaps manipulate the imagination. Since 2012, Younis has collaborated with Arsenal - Institute for Film and Video Art on researching, presenting and publishing on film archives and collections in Berlin, Cairo, Amman and Dresden. She collaborated with projects and symposiums on film archives in Guinea Bissau, Algiers, Beirut, Baghdad and other places. Younis's work has been shown and published internationally. She has been a member of the advisory board of Forum Expanded since 2013, and co-curated the exhibition for the Archival Assembly #1 in 2021. She is a member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Cologne), and co-founder of Kayfa ta, an independent publishing initiative.
Ulrich Ziemons (head of program)
Ulrich Ziemons is a film curator. Since 2012 he has been a member of the curatorial team of Forum Expanded. He has curated film programs for, among others, Kunstverein Leipzig, Kochi Muziris Biennale, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Arsenal - Institut for Film and Video Art and KW - institute for Contemporary Art. From 2014 to 2020 he was a member of the short film selection committee at Dokfest Kassel. He is the author of "Aufzeichnungen eines Storm Squatters", a monograph on George Kuchar's influential Weather Diary video series.
Karina Griffith
The films, installations, and curatorial practices of Karina Griffith explore the themes of fear and fantasy, often focusing on how they relate to belonging. Griffith’s work has been shown at international galleries and festivals, and she has curated film and interdisciplinary programmes for the Goethe Institute, Berlinale Forum, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, alpha nova & galerie futura and VTape among others. She teaches at the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of Art as well as the NODE Centre for Curatorial Studies and is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute, where her research on Black authorship in German cinema interacts with theories of affect and intersectionality. Her writing can be found in the Darkmatter Journal, Women in German Studies’ Special Online Section on Race and Inclusivity, Texte zur Kunst, Canadian Art, Berlin Art Link, Shadow & Act, the Berlinale Forum Magazine.
Maha Maamoun
Maha Maamoun is an artist, curator and independent publisher based in Cairo. She is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), an independent non-profit space for art and culture founded in Cairo in 2004. She co-founded with Ala Younis the independent publishing platform Kayfa ta in 2013. Maha is a member of the curatorial team of Forum Expanded (Berlinale), and the Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne.
Shai Heredia
Shai Heredia is a filmmaker, curator, and founding director of Experimenta, the influential moving image art biennial of India. She has curated film programs worldwide, including Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, Tate Modern, and was the programmer of the 65th Robert Flaherty Seminar. Her films co-directed with Shumona Goel I Am Micro and An Old Dog’s Diary have exhibited, among others, at Guggenheim Museum, Toronto International film festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Kochi Muziris Biennale. Both films have won awards including a National Film Award and BFI London Film Festival award. Heredia has contributed to journals such as MIRAJ The Moving Image Review and Art Journal and PUBLIC. She was the co- editor, with Oliver Husain, of the Loud Mess issue of NANG magazine. Heredia lives and works in Bangalore where she runs Experimenta India, and teaches film and curatorial practice at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
