Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. She holds a PhD in Geography and her dissertation, Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine, highlights the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to use indigenous counter-mapping as a cartographic and decolonial praxis to imagine and work toward liberated futures. 

Dana Erekat is a Palestinian American architect and planner with over 14 years of experience in the field of international development and planning. She has worked across a range of sectors including international organizations, NGOs, and both the private and public sectors. Her professional journey has taken her to the United States, Kuwait, Palestine, and Jordan. From 2013-2016, she was Head of Aid Management and Coordination Directorate/ Advisor to the Minister at the Palestinian Ministry of Planning and Administrative Development, during which she led the technical committee for the 2014 Gaza Reconstruction plan. She is currently the CEO of the impact data analytic company Whyise. Dana is the author of several publications and photography series focused on colonial planning practices. She previously served as the Director of Communications for the MIT Arab Alumni Association, and was a Munich Young Leader Alumna, an MIT Humphrey SPURS fellow, and a Research Fellow at the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem. She has a BA in architecture from UC Berkeley and a Masters in City Planning from MIT.

Jenan Matari (Host) is a 2x award-winning Palestinian storyteller and Producer. She is so busy, we are still waiting for the rest of her bio.

Bassam Haddad (Host) is Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).