In 2025, Sahab created a mentoring program.
More infos coming soon & in the meantime, discover our mentors’ biographies.

Kholoud Saber Barakat

Kholoud Saber Barakat is a feminist clinical psychologist and postdoctoral researcher specializing in trauma, sexual and political violence, war, and displacement in the Middle East. She brings over a decade of experience supporting women human rights defenders and conflict-affected communities across the region. Her work bridges feminist and decolonial approaches to mental health, with a focus on contextual, community-rooted MHPSS interventions. Kholoud currently works as an independent consultant while developing her academic profile in Belgium.

Taous R. Dahmani

Dr Taous R. Dahmani (she/her) is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian specialising in photography. She has curated both group and solo exhibitions internationally, including the 2022 Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles (France) and the 2024 Jaou Photo Biennale in Tunis (Tunisia). Her solo curatorial projects include SMITH at NOUA (Bodø, Norway), Anastasia Samoylova at the Saatchi Gallery (London, UK), and Adam Rouhana at Kyotographie (Kyoto, Japan). Since September 2025, she is curator at the Photographers’ Gallery. Dahmani’s writing has been widely published in photobooks and journals, with contributions to titles by Phaidon, Loose Joints, Textuel, Tate Publishing, and Pompidou, as well as features in Aperture, FOAM, Camera Austria, The British Journal of Photography, Dazed, GQ, and 1000 Words Magazine. She is the associate editor of Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain (MACK/Autograph ABP, 2024), a critically acclaimed, award-winning publication. In 2025, she also edited Assemblies (FOMU) and Feel the Sound (Barbican).

Shady Elnoshokaty

Shady Elnoshokaty is a visual artist, educational curator, and associate professor of studio practices. Born in Damietta City, Egypt, in June 1971, he graduated from the Faculty of Art Education at Helwan University in 1994 and earned his PhD in the Philosophy of Art Education in 2007, focusing on new media arts.From 1996 to 2009, he served as a painting and drawing instructor at the Faculty of Art Education, Helwan University. Subsequently, he was a professor of studio practices and the Director of the Visual Arts Program at the American University in Cairo from 2009 to 2023. His art projects have been featured in prominent contemporary art museums and international exhibitions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale, Hayward Gallery, Mori Art Museum, Kunstmuseum in Stockholm, Bochum, and the Arab World Institute in Paris, among others.

Shady Elnoshokaty has significantly contributed to alternative art education practices in Egypt over the past two decades. From 2000 to 2012, he organized an annual summer program of media art education at the Faculty of Art Education, Helwan University. In 2010, he founded ASCII (Foundation for Contemporary Art Education), an independent research Centre and interactive new media art lab and library. ASCII is dedicated to educating and supporting young Egyptian thinkers and researchers in new and alternative media, education, and contemporary art practices.

Tarik Kiswanson

For more than a decade, Tarik Kiswanson has engaged with themes of loss, memory, and

regeneration through an expansive interdisciplinary practice. His works are shaped by legacies of displacement and transformation, which are essential to both their form and the modes of sensing they produce. While retaining an attachment to the intimate and personal, his practice extends to address universal concerns and broader historical, political and social narratives of rupture and reconstruction. His art engages with the architecture of the spaces in which it is exhibited, forming what he describes as “relational art”—an approach that transcends conventional modes of representation to create holistic experiences.

Kiswanson’s practice critically engages with material culture and the mnemonic capacities of objects, interrogating the enduring aftermath of war and displacement across varied historical and geopolitical contexts. His most recent projects examine how artifacts produced in the aftermath of trauma can be recontextualized as sites of resilience, symbolic regeneration, and collective historical consciousness.

Tarik Kiswanson comes from a Palestinian family that was exiled from Jerusalem, by way of Tripoli and Amman, before finally settling in Halmstad, Sweden, where he was born in 1986. He spent ten years in London, where he studied art, before relocating to Paris, where he has lived and worked since 2010. Kiswanson received an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2014) and a BFA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (2010). His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions all over the world, most recently at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2025), Fundação Iberê Camargo (2025), Kunsthalle Portikus (2024), Bonniers Konsthall (2023), Salzburger Kunstverein (2023), Museo Tamayo (2023) and Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain (2021). He has participated in group exhibitions and biennials at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the 15th Baltic Triennial and the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Tarik Kiswanson is a member of the scientific committee of the Édouard Glissant Art Fund.

Reem Shadid

ريم شديد هي قيّمة تعمل على استكشاف الإمكانيات التحررية في الممارسات الفنية. شغلت مؤخرًا منصب مديرة مركز بيروت للفنون في لبنان (2023-2024) وشاركت في تنظيم معرض "Small World"، النسخة 2023-2024 من بينالي تايبيه. في عام 2023، شاركت أيضًا في تنظيم النسخة الثانية من معرض "New Visions"، التريينالي الخاص بالتصوير الفوتوغرافي والإعلام الجديد في مركز هيني أونستاد للفنون في اوسلو.

ريم تعمل كمحررة مساهمة في منصة "إنفرا سونيكا"، وهي منصة رقمية تُعنى بالثقافات غير الغربية لممارسات الصوت التجريبي والفنون البصرية. كما كانت منتجة ومقدمة برنامج "جلسة سمع" على راديو الحارة؛ وهو سلسلة جلسات استماع مع فنانين وممارسين يعملون عند تقاطع الإنتاجات الصوتية والبصرية والأدبية (2020-2021).

وبين عامي 2006 و2020، شغلت منصب نائب مدير مؤسسة الشارقة للفنون، حيث أدّت أدوارًا متعددة.

Reem Shadid is a curator who works on the emancipatory possibilities within artistic practice. Most recently she was the curator and commissioning editor for project Dignified Life: Outliving Impossible Ecologies (2024-2025). Previously, she was the Director of Beirut Art Center in Lebanon (2023-2024) and a co-curator for Small World, the 2023-2024 edition of Taipei Biennial. She is a contributing editor with Infrasonica, a digital platform of non-western cultures for experimental sound and visual art. She was the producer and host of Radio Alhara’s show Listening with Reem Shadid; listening sessions with artists and practitioners working at the intersection of sonic, visual and literary productions (2020-2021). Between 2006 - 2020 she was the Deputy Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, where she served in various capacities.