Beth Stryker, Executive Director
Beth Stryker has served as Executive Director of ArteEast since 2018, and from 2009-2010 was the first Director of NAAS (Network of Arab Arthouse Screens), a network of cinema organizations in the MENA region incubated by ArteEast. As the Director of NAAS, Stryker championed innovation in cinema exhibition in the Arabic-speaking region, and led pilot programs for the regional distribution of Arab film. She has curated film and video programs for the Beirut Art Center, the Center for Architecture in NYC, the Mix Festival, the New Festival, and the Conspiracies Experimental Film Festival. Stryker is a Co-founder of Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research (CLUSTER), a platform for urban research, architecture, art, and design initiatives based in Downtown Cairo. CLUSTER has received critical recognition for its work, including a Curry Stone Design Prize (2017), and inclusion in the Egyptian National Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2016, 2018). Stryker has curated exhibitions and programs for the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival in Cairo, Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, the AIA/Center for Architecture in New York (where she held the position of Director of Programs), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among other venues. Stryker received her B.A. from Columbia University, and her M.Arch from Princeton University.
Ginou Choueiri, Director of Film Programs
Ginou Choueiri is the Director of Film Programs at ArteEast. She is also an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. She completed an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths University in London with high distinction. In her artistic research, she looks at how complex and often conflicting histories can be reinterpreted, and alternative futures imagined through new forms of storytelling. Her creative documentary film “Rhythm of Forgetting” premiered at DocLisboa, and won several awards such as the Goldsmiths Warden’s prize, special jury mention at DokuBaku, and Best Director Award at Beirut Women’s International Film Festival.
She has exhibited her work internationally, such as Contemporary Art Center of Barcelona (Spain), Merz Foundation (Italy), and Williamsburg Art Center (USA) and was recently a 2022 fellow at UnionDocs Collaborative Studio (NY).
Lila Nazemian, Special Projects Curator
Lila Nazemian (she/her) is an independent curator and the Special Projects Curator at ArteEast in New York. In 2023, she joined the Brooklyn-based Transmitter gallery as a co-director. Her research and curatorial practice are focused on reimagining approaches to histories from the Middle East/Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) and Central Asia regions in an effort to counter narrative revisionism and collective amnesia. Recent curatorial projects include: Now That We Have Established a Common Ground, as part of Protocinema’s Emerging Curator Series at and in partnership with the Clemente, New York (2022); A Few In Many Places in New York, Protocinema, Governors Island New York, (2021); I open my eyes and see myself under a tree laden with fruit that I cannot name, Center for Book Arts, New York (2020). Nazemian teaches part-time at NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Art & Art Professions. She received a B.A. in History from Scripps College, California; and an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from N.Y.U., New York. She was a QAYYEM 2019 Curatorial Fellow, was among the inaugural participants of the 2018-2019 Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York and participated in ICI’s 2018 Curatorial Intensive in Bangkok.
