I came up through the art world in Chicago — as Assistant to the Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, coordinating exhibitions and translating curatorial vision into institutional strategy. That experience gave me a particular sensitivity to how meaning is made inside institutions.

At Pillars Fund, I’ve spent the last five years building one of the most visible fellowship programs in the Muslim creative community — co-designing the Pillars Artist Fellowship in partnership with Riz Ahmed’s Left Handed Films, Netflix, and Amazon MGM Studios.

My writing extends the same questions I ask in my programming work: Who gets to define a community’s story? What does it mean to revisit memory in the body, or to look at an abstraction and recognize your own history in it?

I’m a collaborator at heart. I do my best work in environments where warmth and rigor aren’t considered opposites. If you’re building something and need someone who will show up, ask the right questions, and follow through — I’d love to talk.