Our Team

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Arshad I. Ali is an educator, community worker, and scholar who studies youth culture, race, identity, and politics. He is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Civic Education at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Ali’s research examines the construction of racial identities through exploring questions of democracy, liberalism, and modernity in the lives of youth. He has written extensively on issues relating to the cultural geography of Muslim student surveillance, citizenship, governmentality and other issues of coloniality and Muslims in Western spaces.

Sam Burmester is an educator and education scholar who draws on his career as a Language Arts teacher to explore pedagogies of literary, linguistic, and epistemological pluralism. His current work engages questions of institutional construction of linguistic, epistemological, and cultural legibility in educational spaces, particularly surrounding issues of how individuals, their knowledge, and their ways of knowing are represented and if/how they are able to represent themselves and their knowledge. 

Ahmad Ghassab is our Art Educator. He's also an artist and calligrapher, was raised in Amman, Jordan, where his innate passion for drawing and painting was nurtured by his father. Moving to the United States for his education broadened his cultural horizons and deepened his understanding of global struggles. His artwork seamlessly blends Eastern and Western influences, reflecting themes from his homeland while embracing diverse motifs from his personal experiences.
Beyond his artistic endeavors, Ahmad is deeply committed to education and community engagement. He shares his expertise with young people, fostering a love for art and activism while guiding them towards excellence. Through his dedication to nurturing the next generation of artists and his ability to transcend geographical boundaries with his art, Ahmad Ghassab leaves an enduring legacy of unity, empathy, and inspiration.

Mohammed Saffouri is our Media Coordinator and an award-winning Palestinian-American filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. Saffouri distinguished himself early in his film career by earning a Capital Emmy for his debut documentary film, The First. His next film, Touchline, was selected to participate in the Tribeca Film Festival. Touchline is the first Jordanian film to be screened at Tribeca, and Saffouri is the first alumni from George Mason University to have a film screened at Tribeca in the festival’s history. Saffouri graduated from George Mason University in 2020 with a degree in Film and Video Studies and a concentration in Film Directing. Throughout his eight years in the film and media industry, he has directed three films, produced four films, written three films, and created more than twenty promotional videos for businesses, non-profits, and governmental sectors. His work has been selected in 17 film festivals so far and collected several awards at different film festivals.

Susu Attar is a multimedia artist born in Baghdad and raised in Los Angeles, where she lives. Susu’s individual and communal practices explore themes including mourning, hospitality, healing and renewal. Her work across mediums often documents and reimagines struggles for self-determination, from the level of the individual to the family; from local communities to transnational diasporas. Through her wide-ranging approach, Susu examines existing frameworks within both everyday life and political movements and creates new contexts that center the notion of art as a means of transformation and a space of interconnection. Susu’s commitment to building narratives that open up future possibilities for both individual and collective agency have led her to extend her practice to production design, curating, creative direction and world building. As an educator, she has produced and facilitated programs and workshops in the US and abroad, utilizing art practices to expand communal imagination. Susu is a member of SEPIA Collective, a WOC art collective whose work includes a traveling exhibition, ICONIC: Black Panther. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University in Painting and Conceptual Information Art.