2025 AWARDEES

Alex Tan and Kendall Dorland

Alex Tan (not featured) and Kendall Dorland are MA students at the Kevorkian Center. Kendall is studying ruination, grief, and the elegy in classical and modern Arabic poetry. Alex is interested in topologies of sleep and dreaming across the corpus of Arabic literature, alongside comparative questions of aesthetics and translation.

Ghost in the Machine: Otherworldly Mediterranean Crossings

Our project, creative in nature, probes the stakes of migration from North Africa across the Mediterranean by juxtaposing the supernatural and the technological—the ghosts haunting the ocean and the drones policing its shores—framing the sea through the Islamic conception of barzakh, a waystation between life and death.

Emilio Tamburini

Emilio Tamburini is a researcher and filmmaker working at the threshold of experimental ethnography and cultural history, with a focus on sound and spatial politics. They are pursuing a joint degree in Italian studies and Culture & Media at NYU. Based in Brooklyn, Emilio researches and hangs out in Berlin and in Italy as well.

The right to re-imagine the city. A shared audiovisual ethnography on marginalized urban participation in Bologna, Italy.

Who has the right to re-imagine the city? By means of collaborative and experimental filmmaking, my research investigates the poetics and politics of urban experience, focussing on the creative dimension of urban participation and imagination by marginalized migrant communities and their allies in Bologna, Italy.

Feven Berhanu

Feven Berhanu is a PhD student with research interests in Afro-diasporic thought, Black poetics and literary tradition, as well as borders and migration.

Faces of Diaspora

This project explores the ways African governments and institutions like Ethiopia and the African Union have incorporated and utilized narratives of diasporic belonging within their administrations.

Onat Ozan Ata

PhD student in History & Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU, whose research explores environmental and rural histories of the Eastern Mediterranean, focusing on pastoralist mobility and how communities interacted with the ecologies they inhabited.

Defiant Landscapes: The Forced Settlement of the Pastoralists in the 18th-Century Eastern Mediterranean

This project traces how the Ottoman Empire’s efforts to relocate and sedentarize pastoralist tribes in southern Anatolia and northern Syria led to decades of human and animal mobility across land and sea, reshaping the region’s history in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Sofia Jiménez Saborit 

Agricultural labor migration between Mexico and the US

My project examines the migration of Mexican farmworkers to the U.S., focusing on labor conditions to explore broader questions of development, poverty, labor standards, and global inequality, with an emphasis on the role of migration in agricultural labor and its impact on poverty.

Amaya Dickson

M.A. student at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Gallatin Global Human Rights Fellow, former refugee resettlement caseworker

Between Borders: Refugee Rights, Protections, and Violations in Host Nations 

This project broadly examines the limitations of refugee rights and protections in host nations–focusing on accountability, access to aid, and systemic failures–while specifically exploring third-country resettlement, global non-citizenship, and U.S. resettlement policy amid a rapidly shifting legal landscape.

Jasmine Harvey

Jazmín Harvey is a queer Latinx filmmaker from Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her concentration at Gallatin explores the intersection between exclusionary US - Mexico border policies and Hollywood films, while also highlighting the role of artistic resistance in border communities.  

Shifting Borders

This collaborative documentary explores how movement and restriction shapes the lives of people living in the US- Mexico border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas.

Jasmine Khelil

Jasmine Khelil is enrolled in the joint Global Journalism and Near Eastern Studies Program as a Fulbright grantee and is interested in reporting on conflicts, investigative reporting, as well as documentary filmmaking.

Who Am I, With Time and Exile? من أنا مع المنفى؟

This project follows the lives of Palestinians in diaspora, shedding light on how different experiences and decisions have shaped Palestinian identity and refugees' relation to the land today. 

Leticia Berrizbeitia Añez

Cinema Is Not a Luxury: A Feminist Diasporic Rewriting of Latin American Cineastes Prudencia Grifell and Margot Benacerraf.

My project recasts the histories of the first two Venezuelan female filmmakers through a feminist diasporic lens. I am creatively addressing their absence from film history and reinterpreting it in light of the country’s current migrant crisis through a video essay as a method to further interrogate archival materials.

Ran Mei

A doctoral student from the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies whose research examines the architecture and infrastructure of food system. 

Beef Noodle Soup, Live Mitten Crabs, Stuffed Pandas, and QR Codes: Tracing Chinese Immigrant Networks through A Food Truck in Lower Manhattan 

This project explores how a Chinese food truck stationed outside NYU’s Bobst library serves as a critical node in transnational immigrant networks, illuminating how Chinese migrants navigate legal precarity and sustain livelihoods through informal economies, digital platforms, and improvised infrastructures in contemporary urban space.