About

Ali Araghi is an Iranian writer and translator and the winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing. His writing and translation have appeared in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and Asymptote, among other places. His debut novel, The Immortals of Tehran, was published in 2020 and has since been translated into Dutch and Arabic.

Mahshad Farnoush is passionate about the intersection of culture, storytelling, and data. With a background in data science and a Master’s degree in Data Science and Analytics, she brings a unique lens to exploring literature, art, and social life through computational methods. Her work focuses on uncovering patterns and insights that support community engagement and cultural understanding. Drawing on experience in machine learning and natural language processing, Mahshad has contributed to projects across the arts, health, and urban development, always with a commitment to making data meaningful and human-centered.

Idée Edalatishams is an applied linguist and a faculty member at George Mason University, where she supports multilingual speakers and writers in expressing their ideas more effectively. Her research lies at the intersection of spoken corpus linguistics and pronunciation with a particular interest in the use of technological tools in language learning and the analysis of prosodic features in second language speech. She has also explored multilingual learners’ identities and the instructional discourse of multilingual teaching assistants. Idée earned her PhD in Applied Linguistics and Technology from Iowa State University in 2022.

Nikoo Mamdoohi is an Iranian theater director and founder of Vaahe Art Collective. With an MFA in Theater Directing from UMass Amherst, she has directed numerous plays in Iran and the US, focusing on site-specific and immersive performances that explore mortality and ephemerality. She co-founded Alma Theater Company in Washington, DC, where she directed Home (2019), the first Farsi play performed at the Kennedy Center with an all-Iranian cast, and Lost in the Ocean Waves (2019) at Arena Stage. Collaborating with playwright Q-mars Haeri, she challenges conventional storytelling with translingual dramaturgy, and with composer Pedram Babaiee, she integrates original music into her work. Mamdoohi has also worked with Ifa Bayeza on Ta’zieh-Between Two Rivers (2017) and directed notable productions including NDE (2017), Medeamaterial (2014), and 7 Days of Understanding (2014).

Q-mars Haeri is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He is a theatre historian and practitioner and holds a PhD from University of Maryland. His research interest is on cultural production in Iran, questioning how we categorize cultural products either with dignity and as sublime, or as degenerate and vulgar, and to what extent these categorizations are influenced by notions of class, and the urban/rural divide. From 2022 to 2024, Haeri served as a faculty member and director of the theatre program at the American University of Kuwait.