Public & Community Practice

Alongside my studio-based work, my practice extends into public, collective, and community-centered contexts. Through workshops, curatorial projects, public programs, and facilitated conversations, I collaborate with artists, community partners, and institutions to explore language, displacement, memory, and belonging. This work emphasizes participation, accessibility, and dialogue, and often operates at the intersection of art, education, and civic space.

The following are select examples of my public and community practice.

Workshops & Participatory Programs

Compassionate Exclusion (2024–ongoing)
Designed and facilitated a participatory escape-room experience examining U.S. immigration bureaucracy and bureaucratic violence. Managed interdisciplinary teams, audience engagement, and accompanying public programs. San Francisco, CA.

Bi-Lingering (2021–ongoing)
Co-created a participatory, multimedia art project exploring multilingual and cross-cultural identity, leading national engagement strategies and facilitating community-based workshops. Created with Labkhand Olfatmanesh. California and virtual.

Tekah Tekah (“Piece by Piece”) (2023)
Developed and led a participatory textile and storytelling project that supporting Afghan refugee women in the Bay Area through paid, Farsi-language workshops in embroidery, quilting, and visual storytelling. The project culminated in a public exhibition of participant-owned work. Supported by a California Arts Council Impact Project grant and realized in partnership with ARTogether, with co-teaching by Katayoun Bahrami. Oakland, CA.

How Culture Matters: Tools for Social Justice Through Self-Empowerment (2018)
Co-led a workshop with Helena Zeweri at the Afghan American Conference examining culture as a tool for social justice, with a focus on collective care, equity, and political engagement. Presented as a program of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA). New York University, NY.

For more examples, please visit my CV.

Curatorial projects

Stitching Keffiyehs: Moving images from Palestine (2024)
A film and video exhibition featuring artists from Palestine and its diaspora, spanning works from 1987–2022. Created in response to the silencing and marginalization of Palestinian voices, the exhibition foregrounds cultural production as a site of memory, resistance, and collective reflection, engaging themes of land, exile, occupation, gender, ecology, and the body. Co-curated with Asma Kazmi and Tamar Beja and presented as an exhibit of the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, UC Berkeley, CA.

Emergenc(y): Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War (2023)
Brought together established and emerging artists, including recent refugees, through a bilingual open call. Secured funding from eight academic departments and three national organizations to mount the exhibition. Installations extended into public-facing spaces to draw new audiences, while lecture performances, dance, and an accompanying anthology engaged participants across disciplines and backgrounds. Co-curated with Katayoun Bahrami and presented as an exhibition of the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, UC Berkeley, CA, in collaboration with the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA).

Reimagining Queer Futures: Afghans and Art in the Diaspora (2020)
Organized and hosted a virtual panel with the Samovar Network, bringing together scholars and artists to explore queer Afghan perspectives in contemporary art and culture. Presented as a program of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA).

Meditation on Migrations and Borders (2020)
An interdisciplinary program featuring art, poetry, and music by local BIPOC artists, exploring fluid cultural borders and nonviolent resistance. Co-presented as a program of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (AAAWA) and hosted by Sounds of Soul Force at the Church of the Epiphany, Los Angeles. Project Lead: Maryam Hosseinzadeh. And Lincoln heights center

Fragmented Futures: Afghanistan 100 Years Later (2019)
Presented in partnership with the City of Glendale's public library, this multidisciplinary project engaged diverse immigrant communities through an exhibition, zine, film screening, music performance, poetry reading, and reading list. Developed through an open call, the project required coordination across multiple municipal departments and community partners. Co-curated with Helena Zeweri, Ara and Anahid Oshagan. (Exhibition catalogue)

Exhibition Production

From 2021–2025, I served as Director of the Worth Ryder Art Gallery at the University of California, Berkeley. Alongside curating select exhibitions, I led exhibition production, public programming, and gallery operations, supporting artists and students in realizing ambitious contemporary art projects. Through mentorship and institutional collaboration, I expanded the gallery's capacity for creative experimentation, learning, and public engagement.

INTERNATIONAL & VISITING ARTIST EXHIBITIONS

Both Sides Now 10 (2025)
A survey of moving-image works from the first decade of Both Sides Now, an international exchange program connecting artists from Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Featuring ten artists, the exhibition explored identity, technology, memory, and transformation through film and video. Curated by Videoclub and Dr. Isaac Leung.

Black Chicagoland (2023)
A multi-sensory installation by Roderick E. Jackson and April L. Graham-Jackson exploring Black life, memory, and place-making across Chicagoland through photography, sound, and personal narrative. The exhibition included Still Sweatin', a dedicated space examining the cultural and spatial significance of Chicago's Black House Music community.

More than meets AI (2023)
Produced a multidisciplinary exhibition exploring the relationship between artificial intelligence, creativity, and culture. Developed in partnership with the University of Bergen's Center for Digital Narrative and the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study, the exhibition brought together more than twenty international artists and researchers. Coordinated the installation of technically complex digital and time-based media works, including multi-channel video, projection, and custom computing systems. Public programming included an artist-led bus and walking tour of internet infrastructure sites across Berkeley, Emeryville, and Oakland, examining the social, cultural, and environmental impacts of emerging technologies. Curated by Jill Miller, Eamon O'Kane, and Scott Rettberg.

STUDENT & ACADEMIC EXHIBITIONS

Collapsense: First Year MFA Exhibition (2024)
The inaugural annual exhibition of UC Berkeley's first-year MFA cohort, presenting new works responding to ecological uncertainty, political instability, and contemporary forms of precarity. Developed around the student-generated concept of “collapsense,” the exhibition brought together diverse artistic approaches to understanding the present moment.

Cacophonies of Resistance: First Year MFA Show (2023)
Featuring new work by UC Berkeley's MFA cohort of 2024, the exhibition examined resistance as both a critical and imaginative practice. Through varied media and approaches, participating artists explored alternative futures, collective resilience, and social transformation.

Art for the Asking (2022)
Drawn from UC Berkeley's Graphic Arts Loan Collection, this exhibition highlighted original prints available for students, faculty, and staff to borrow through the Morrison Library. Featuring works by artists including Francisco Goya, Rembrandt, Pablo Picasso, Corita, and Ellsworth Kelly, the exhibition celebrated the accessibility and circulation of art within a university community.

PROOF: 28 Years of Printmaking at UC Berkeley (2022)
A retrospective celebrating nearly three decades of printmaking instruction at UC Berkeley, featuring work from more than 1,100 students across disciplines. Organized by printmaking process, the exhibition highlighted the breadth of the program and the archive built over twenty-eight years of teaching.

COMMUNITY & SOCIALLY ENGAGED PROJECTS

Virgins in Heaven / Weaving Strings of Grief (2022)
Exhibition of Iranian artist Badri Valian, whose interactive performances and multimedia works address displacement, discrimination, and the social consequences of political and humanitarian crises. Public programming included included Valian's participatory social practice project Thinking the Unthinkable, which invited audiences to engage with questions of disappearance, memory, and political violence in Iran, as well as Weaving Strings of Grief, a collaborative performance by Katayoun Bahrami and Narges Poursadeqi expressing solidarity with Iranian women and protesters. Together, the exhibition and related programs created space for dialogue around art, activism, grief, and collective resistance.

Weaving Strings of Grief (2022). Photo courtesy of Narges Poursadeqi.

Public Speaking & Facilitation

Guest Lecture (2025)
Diasporas and Belonging: Anthropological Perspectives, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

Presentation (with Helena Zeweri, 2025)
“Bureaucratic Violence and the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan: An Artistic and Ethnographic Perspective,” Displaced Arts: Creative Practices and Geographies of Asylum Symposium, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Panel Discussion (2024)
“Intersectional Identities,” South Asian Literature and Art Festival, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

For more examples, please visit my CV.

Writing & Critical Discourse

Poem (2026)
”What have you done to survive, and how did the earth hold you?” in “bey-zubaan; without a tongue” by Sheekshaka. MOTHER TONGUE, Issue 58. The Markaz Review, March 6, 2026.

Article (2025)
”Disrupting the Colonial Canvas: Afghan Art in the Wake of Withdrawal” in Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power, Duke University Press.
This chapter draws on experiences during the U.S./NATO withdrawal and discusses the installation With/Draw and the exhibition Emergenc(y): Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War, examining how Afghan artists challenge colonial narratives and imagine new futures.

Interview (2024)
”‘Lives from the Ruins’: An Interview with the Curators of Stitching Keffiyehs.” Millennium Film Journal, Issue 80. A conversation discussing the curatorial approach, exhibition themes, material practice, and strategies for amplifying marginalized voices through film and video art.

For more examples, please visit my CV.