Maytha Alhassen
Dr. Maytha Alhassen, a Harvard Religion + Public Life Fellow in Art and Pop Culture and a Garrison Institute fellow, primarily sees her labor as that of a freedom doula and an engaged wit/h/ness reviving the traditions of the feral femme. She is a historian, TV writer + producer, journalist, arts-based social justice organizer, and mending practitioner.
As a journalist, she worked as an on-air host for Al Jazeera English and The Young Turks, also field reporting and opining for such outlets as CNN, Huffington Post, Mic, Boston Review, LA Review of Books, and the Baffler. In 2017, Alhassen was awarded a TED residency that culminated in the TED talk "A Poem for Syria: Beyond a Geography of Violence" about her ancestral relationship to Syria and work with displaced communities in the region.
As a scholar, Alhassen holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California, M.A. in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Political Science and Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Alhassen co-edited a volume on narratives from the 2011 Arab uprisings Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions (White Cloud Press, 2012) and authored the report Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and How to Transform Them (Pop Culture Collaborative, 2018) as a Pop Culture Collaborative Senior Fellow. She has also authored numerous academic articles.
As a mender and cultural worker, Alhassen has facilitated healing workshops infused with art, trauma-informed yoga, meditation, and reiki to displaced people in Greece, Turkey, along the US-Mexico border, U.S. prisons, and in fugitive spaces. Alhassen has also helped launch multiple social justice organizations including the Social Justice Institute at Occidental College, Believers Bail Out (a Muslim abolitionist group), and in the wake of George Floyd's brutal murder, the Arabs for Black Lives collective.
Currently, Alhassen produces and writes for Golden Globe and Peabody-winning Hulu series Ramy as Co-Executive Producer, and serves as an Executive Producer for the upcoming docuseries American Muslims: A History Revealed. As a Pop Culture Collaborative Pluralist Visionaries Fellow, Alhassen recently launched a new critical media nad creative media literacy-driven web series with Slow Factory, Key Terms, which offers 3- to 20-minute multi-perspective, deep dives into provocative and controversial terms, including one on the history of the "feral femme." The "feral feme" emerged from ne of Alhassen's poems and transuted into a clothing capsule with NorBlack NorWhite and an upcoming book.