Ancestral Computation

Kamee Abrahamian holds a BFA/BA in film and political science (Concordia University), an MA in expressive art therapy (European Graduate Institute), and an MA/PhD in Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco Psychologies (Pacifica Graduate Institute). Their doctoral research explored legacies of relational ontologies and ethics of care by diasporic-SWANA women and queers. Kamee has created, produced, toured, and presented a vast body of work including narrative & documentary film, visual & media art, staged & immersive performances, exhibitions, magazines, anthologies, workshops, festivals, advocacy campaigns, and podcasts. Their projects have been supported by local and national funding bodies across Canada, USA, and Armenia. They’re a Pushcart nominated writer, a Lambda-awarded playwright, and an alumni resident at VONA, Banff Center for Arts, and DocX (Duke University). The documentaries they’ve worked on with Oolik Productions have been supported by Sundance, Visions du Réel, HotDocs, and Catapult. Their short film Transmission (2019)—the first known Armenian science fiction film—premiered at BFI FLARE, and their documentary Symptom (2024) premiered at the SF Doc Fest. Most recently, received the 2025 Creative Capital Award, published a children’s book The Brighter I Shine, and organized a multi-day arts program for a gathering of 4000 global-south feminist activists in Bangkok (AWID Forum 2024). For the screen, they are currently developing a short film anthology Portals, a limited series Ensouled, and a feature film We Are Our Mountains. They are also touring a mixed-media monument project for Western Armenians Flesh, Immemorial, and writing a graphic novel based on their experiences as a new, queer, neuro-spicy mother called Queer Motherhood is Fucking Magic.

Nouf Aljowaysir is a new media artist and product designer at Medium based in Brooklyn. She splits her time between the art and tech world to study how technologies are designed and their consequential impacts on society and culture. Her artistic research and work specifically focuses on our changing relationship with algorithms. She poses intimate questions to tools of "intelligence", using the exchange to reflect not only on herself but also on how these systems shape our ways of seeing and thinking. Nouf has been awarded residencies at ThoughtWorks Arts and Somerset House. Her work has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals such as the Centre Pompidou, M+ Museum, CPH:DOX, and the Tribeca Film Festival, among others.

Yazan Khalili is a visual artist, architect, and cultural activist. Khalili's photography is detailed, reflective and full of intent. Using photography and the written word, Khalili unpacks historically constructed landscapes. Borrowing from cinematic language, images become frames where the spectator embodies the progression of time and narratives. He weaves together parallel stories over the years, forming both questions and paradoxes concerning scenery and the act of gazing, all of which are refracted through the prism of intimate politics and alienating poetics. In particular, he focuses on the effect of geographical distance on our rendering of territory, and its ability to heighten or arrest our political and sentimental attachments. He works in and out of Palestine, and is currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where he is a PhD candidate at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited in several major exhibitions, including among others: Documenta fifteen 2022, KW, Berlin 2020, MoCA Toronto 2020, New Photography, MoMA 2018, Jerusalem Lives, Palestinian Museum, 2017, Post-Peace, Kunstverein Stuttgart 2017, Shanghai Biennial 2016, Sharjah Biennial 2013. In 2020 he co-founded Radio Alhara, and in 2019 he co-founded The Question of Funding collective.

Sadia Quddus (she/her) is a media artist and graphic designer based in Los Angeles. Drawing upon her Islamic heritage, her work crafts a new spiritual practice focused on the confluence of the technological, political, and metaphysical. Her practice utilizes observation and endurance through performance and ritual, connecting to natural landscapes through the manipulation of image surfaces. Her current research studies hyper-visibility, digital surveillance, sacred ecologies, empire, and autonomy. Sensorial and spatial, Sadia’s work takes the form of physical and digital sculpture, textile design, video installations, graphic objects, and imaging technologies. Using abstraction and fragmentation to express complex present realities, she develops her own palette of symbols, motifs, and entities rooted in natural landscapes to gesture at the relationships between the corporeal and territorial “body.” Sadia holds an undergraduate degree in Architecture and an MFA in Graphic Design from RISD.

Emily Mkrtichian is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist from a displaced, diasporic family who explores alternative archives and visionary futures of the SWANA region. Her films include the first Armenian sci-fi film, Transmission, which premiered at the BFI Flare Film Festival, and the feature documentary There Was, There Was Not, which premiered at True/False and won several awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize at the Golden Apricot Film Festival and the Audience Award and Jury Award at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. In addition to her films, Emily's multimedia installation Luys i Luso, created in collaboration with Tigran Hamasyan, has been exhibited in museums, concert halls, and public spaces around the globe. Emily has been an LA Arts Activation Fund recipient, A Locarno Film Festival Open Doors fellow, a UnionDocs Summer Lab Fellow, and participated in the Torino Film Creative Producing Lab. She is a recipient of the 2025 Creative Capital award, a DocX Fellow at Duke University, and an alumni of the Sundance Institute. She currently splits her time between the US and Armenia.

Lee Williams Boudakian (uses they, them, theirs pronouns) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, producer, facilitator, and consultant based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territories. Lee’s work emerges from their experiences as a queer, trans, mixed race settler born into an immigrant family. Their work is critical and necessarily intersectional. Lee is invested in art and storytelling that integrates ancestral and cultural herstories; grapples with our current worlds; and visions into futures that centre the lives and stories of those of us currently living on the fringe and in the margins. As of 2016, Lee has been working under ShapeShift Arts and Kalik. Both of these projects house their creative collaborations and represent models for how they are currently building an arts practice for interdisciplinary collaborative work.

Anahid Yahjian is an independent writer, director and producer of experimental, documentary and narrative cinema. Her work is driven by questioning and pursuit: of history, of power, of memory, of liminality, of the surreal and the sublime. Her commitment to telling true stories (even if they come from her imagination) was shaped by an early love for visual storytelling that was formalized in college and took flight during her coming of age in Armenia. There, she produced the internationally awarded narrative short 140 Drams (Camerimage, Clermont-Ferrand), laid the creative groundwork for the feature documentary Spiral (IDFA Bertha Fund 2015, Golden Apricot) and shot and directed the viral digital documentary LEVON: A Wondrous Life. Since returning to Los Angeles, she shot and directed the experimental cine-triptych, Corpus Callosum, and directed the narrative science-fiction short Transmission (BFI Flare, Vancouver QFF). She was later commissioned by the City of Glendale’s ReflectSpace gallery to create the docu-memoir Hishé. Her latest work is the hybrid/experimental documentary Domestic Demon. When not creating her own work, she directs branded content and music videos for clients such as AMC Networks, Amazon Music and Joyful Noise Recordings. Recently, she also supervised post production on televised series and digital content for A24, Netflix, Vice and Spotify.