People

In the 9th Sharjah Biennial, selections of poetry by Adele NeJame were exhibited alongside paintings of Hawaiian flowers by her daughter, the artist Melissa Chimera.

Ngaire Blankenberg is the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art (2021–present).

Shinichiro Ogata is a designer and restaurateur who heads up his own small design company called Simplicity.

Chika Okeke-Agulu is an artist, critic and art historian who specialises in Indigenous, modern and contemporary African and African Diaspora art history and theory.

Sahar Qawasmi is an architect, restorer, organiser and forager as well as the co-founder and director of Sakiya, an international residency programme and research platform in Ramallah, Palestine.

Manuel Raeder is the founder of Berlin-based interdisciplinary design studio, Studio Manuel Raeder (2003), which works in a wide range of formats.

Russell Rickford is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. He specialises in African- American political culture after World War II, the Black Radical Tradition and transnational social movements.

Writer and art manager Wided Rihana Khadraoui works at the intersection of contemporary art and its production, research practice, and development theory in the Middle East and North Africa.

Kyohei Sakaguchi is an artist and architect, who works with used and discarded materials to create mobile structures.

Abdulraheem Salim's paintings and sculptures reflect a fascination with both figurative and abstract forms and depict his longstanding engagement with Emirati culture and the history of the Arabian Gulf.

Seeds Collective is an informal community library which houses intersectional feminist texts, along with community-affirming screenings and workshops.

Composer and musician Keiichiro Shibuya has created musical works for live performances, films and sound installations and established the music label ATAK.

T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics and ecology. He is Professor in Art History, Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, as well as founder and director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Megan Tamati-Quennell is a writer and curator of modern and contemporary Māori and Indigenous art.