Our Advisory Board
Nana Abuelsoud
Nana Abuelsoud is a feminist and population policy researcher from Cairo, and holds a Master’s degree in public health with a focus on health systems. She monitors and contextualizes national population (control) programs to build evidence that addresses modern eugenics, regressive international aid, and authoritarianism. Nana is a member of RESURJ. She also serves on AWID’s Board of Directors and the Mama Cash Community Committee. Previously, Nana was affiliated with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Ikhtyar Feminist Collective, and the Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research.
Dr. Sara Mourad
Sara Mourad is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. Her work explores the boundaries and frictions of the personal and the political in contemporary Arab media, literature, and public cultures. Her research on gender, sexual politics, and feminist and queer histories and movements has been published in edited volumes and academic journals. Sara is also a writer of non-fiction and her essays and commentaries have appeared in Jadaliyya, Al-Jumhuriya, Megaphone, Legal Agenda, and Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal. She is currently working on her first monograph, an intimate history of debt and inheritance in postwar Lebanon. Sara received her PhD in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and her BA in Political Science at AUB. In 2018, she was a Global Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. In 2021/22, she was a EUME fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin. Between 2016 and 2021, she co-directed the Women and Gender Studies program at AUB.
Elissa Shamma
Elissa Shamma is a feminist facilitator, researcher, and designer with over 10 years of experience across Lebanon, Syria, and the wider MENA region. Her work weaves together participatory research, creative design, and facilitation, driven by a strong commitment to feminist organizing, collective empowerment, and transformative justice.
She has designed and facilitated a wide range of processes in complex and conflict-affected settings, including regional dialogues, co-learning spaces, and trainings on feminist solidarity, gender justice, racial justice, and localisation. She previously worked as Program Officer for Syria at The Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation, where she co-designed and managed programs supporting feminist actors and groups in challenging environments.
Rana Hassan
Rana Hassan is a community facilitator and an urban researcher. With an academic background in Urban Studies, her research and practice in that area focuses on urban social movements, feminist urbanisms, informal settlements and participatory planning. More recently, she’s been focusing on group facilitation; she joined forces with other trainers and facilitators, co-founding a cooperative that is dedicated to community facilitation from a feminist perspective with a focus on supporting cooperatives and horizontal groups, as well as movement building.