Maryam Kashani

Maryam Kashani is a Chicago-based filmmaker and writer from San Francisco. Her work is engaged with the relationships between physical landscapes and the material and spiritual histories and forces that emerge with and against them. Her practice extends across image, sound, performance, and text towards building relations and power. Her films and video installations have exhibited internationally, including at the Sharjah Biennial, MoMA, Hammer Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. Her book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023) is an ethnocinematic examination of how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Kashani is also an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an affiliate with Anthropology, Media and Cinema Studies, and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.