Ali Shobeiri
Ali Shobeiri is Assistant Professor of Photography and Visual Culture at Leiden University. His current research and publications are in the fields of photography theories, phenomenology, aesthetics, and spatial studies. He is the author of Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography (LUP, 2021), and co-editor of Animation and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Psychosomatic Imagery: Photographic Reflections on Mental Disorders (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Virtual Photography: Artificial Intelligence, In-game, and Extended Reality (Transcript Publishing, 2024), and Oikography: Homemaking through Photography (LUP, 2025). His upcoming books are: Aquatic Thinking in a Fluid Age (co-authored) and Photography / Intensity / Measure (co-edited).
Gillian Rose
Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993), Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, fifth edition 2023), and editor of Seeing the City Digitally (Taylor & Francis 2022). She is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Animated Urbanism: Bringing Cities to Digital Life.
Munem Wasif
Munem Wasif’s photography and film investigates complex social and political issues with a humanistic language, by getting close to the people, physically and psychologically, dealing with multiple questions and contradictions. Expressionistic in style and long-term in method, Wasif often experiments beyond the tradition, tests the possibilities of fiction, by borrowing a familiar documentary language. His interest is often on the concept of ‘documents’ and ‘archives’ and it’s influence on addressing politically and geographically complex issues. His work exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Victoria & Albert Museum, Musée De L’ Elysée and Sharjah, Singapore, Gwangju biennale. He has been a co-curator of Chobi Mela since the festival’s eighth edition in 2015, and has curated two major survey shows for the festival since then: of legendary Bangladeshi photographer Anwar Hossain (Chobi Mela VIII, 2015), and Nasir Ali Mamun (Chobi Mela IX, 2017). Together with Mahbubur Rahman, he also co-curated 1134 – Lives not Numbers (2014), an exhibition paying tribute to the garment workers who lost their lives in the Rana Plaza factory disaster. Wasif’s book publications include Kromosho (Nokhta, 2025), Belonging (Clémentine de la Feronnière Editions, 2013) and Salt Water Tears (Images Plurielles, 2011); and together with Tanzim Wahab, he has published two editions of Kamra, a Bangla-language anthology of essays on photography. He was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany from 2020-2021. Munem Wasif received Robert Gardener fellowship in 2023 to work on the critical history of indigo in Bengal.