Farah Atoui, PhD

Farah Atoui is a cultural organizer and a media scholar specializing in contemporary film, video, and visual culture with a focus on moving-image practices from the Arab world. Atoui’s work explores artistic interventions produced under conditions of struggle and duress—war, occupation, colonization, crisis, displacement– as both tools and spaces for resistance, as well as sites for critical knowledge production that re-energize solidarity and decolonial imaginaries. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University, where her doctoral research examined post-2011 experimental Syrian documentaries as countervisualizations to the representational regime of the refugee “crisis.” She held a postdoctoral position at Concordia's Communication Studies Department, in affiliation with the Feminist Media Studio. She is an independent curator and film programmer, and a member of the Regards Palestiniens and Regards Syriens screening collectives.

FMST 335 | Arab Cinema: Histories, Politics, Global Movements (undergraduate course, Winter 2026)
FMST 448 | Visual Cultures of Resistance: Contemporary Practices and Aesthetics in Experimental Film and Video Art (undergraduate advanced seminar, Winter 2026)
FMST 804 | Borders, Displacement, and Media (PhD seminar, Fall 2025)
FMST 204 | Approaches to Film and Moving Image Studies (undergraduate course, Fall 2025)
FMST 316 | Film and Moving Image Cultures: Media of Resistance (undergraduate course, Winter 2025)
FMST 620 |Borders, Displacement, and Media (MA seminar, Winter 2024)

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS:

Farah Atoui (forthcoming). “Migrant Syrian Cinema.” Routledge Handbook on Popular Culture in the Middle East, edited by Caroline Rooney and Anastasia Valassopoulos. London: Routledge.

Farah Atoui (forthcoming). “Cinema as Translation: Witnessing and Solidarity in Sara Fattahi’s Chaos.” Cinema of Global Solidarity, edited by Masha Salazkina and Matthew Croombs, Oxford University Press.

Farah Atoui and Muhammad Nour El Khairy (forthcoming). “Questionnaire on Practices of Cinematic Solidarity.” Global Solidarity and/in Cinematic Practices. Conversations. Ed. Masha Salazkina. Frankfurt: Meson Press.

Farah Atoui (2023). “Of Place and Cement.” World Records Journal Vol. 8 

Farah Atoui (2020). “Return, Recollect, Imagine: Decolonizing Images, Reclaiming Palestine.” Postcolonial Directions in Education, 9(1), 8-42 

Farah Atoui (2020). “The Calais Crisis: Real Refugees Welcome, Migrants ‘Do Not Come’.” Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis edited by Krista Lynes, Tyler Morgenstern, Ian Alan Paul. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. 211-228 

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

Farah Atoui and Nour Ouayda (2020). “Surgissements : poétiques de l’image vidéo.” Hors champ, Mai/Juin.

Farah Atoui (2016).  “S’approprier, re-monter, effacer, s’approcher: la puissance de transformation du cinéma dans ‘Recollection’ de Kamal Aljafari.” Hors champ, Nov./Dec.

Farah Atoui (2016). “Appropriate, Remix, Erase, Zoom-in: The Transformative Power of Filmmaking in Kamal Al Jafari’ s Recollection.” Offscreen, 20 (10).

2025 | forms of resistance/love is the deepest

Co-convened this interdisciplinary workshop that explored how diverse creative practices—artistic, discursive, and curatorial—grapple with the challenges of expression and representation in contexts marked by profound violence and struggle. Taking the work of multi-disciplinary artist Jayce Salloum as a point of departure, the workshop approached these questions through a critical and experimental lens, centering the potential of form—visual, sonic, textual, and relational—to engage with the unspeakable and the unrepresentable in times of crisis.

2021 | Imaging and Imagining Intimacy

Co-convened this interdisciplinary conference explores the critical possibilities afforded by imaging processes and practices in the production of diverse forms of intimacy as a crucial locus for the possible reconfiguration of social and geo/political relations. February 11-13, McGill University (online).

2018-19 | The Political Imaginary of Waiting 

Co-organized this year-long graduate student working group and public screening and lecture series dedicated to exploring the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of waiting through the lens of media studies. This project culminated in an artist-led workshop focused on decolonial artistic practices. Supported and hosted by the Global Emergent Media Lab (Concordia University) and La Lumière collective, Montréal. 

EXHIBITIONS

2021 | Making Revolution: Collective Histories, Desired Futures 

A video exhibition which explores forms and embodiments of struggle and revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. While the 2011 upheavals are often considered a turning point in the region’s political history, Making Revolution engage with different temporalities, earlier revolutions, and their political and poetic legacies to reactivate their potential in the present moment.  Nov.11-Dec.11, Montreal Arts Interculturels (MAI). 

SCREENINGS

2025-2026 | The Political Aesthetic, Edition 2 

This second iteration continues the screening series’ commitment to examining–through a transnational lens–film and artistic practices that grapple with the entangled social and political histories of colonial and nation-building projects, and the extractive economies that underpin them. Bringing together contemporary and historical works from the Global South, the program considers their epistemological and material conditions across diverse geographies in Asia, Africa, and South America. With the support of the Feminist Media Studio, October 2025-April 2026, La lumière Collective, Montréal.

2025 | talking about it is also resistance

A screening event that explores the interview as form. The program foregrounds four video and filmic works that disrupt interview conventions, breaking away from fixed storytelling structures and power dynamics to create space for unexpected turns in conversation and encounter. March 15, Cinema Public.

2025 | Land Back: From Palestine to Turtle Island

A screening event bringing together experimental film and video works by Palestinian and Indigenous artists to explore connections between land, identity, and anti-colonial struggles. In collaboration with Vidéographe, February 13, Dazibao gallery, Montréal. 

2024 | Bye Bye Tiberias 

A Palestine solidarity screening, in collaboration with Cinema sous les etoiles, August 15, Molson Park, Montréal.

2024 | Journal d'une occupation/Diaries of An Occupation

A screening event featuring a program of experimental short films on/from Palestine, a live musical performance, and a projection of footage from “Katsakh: Mediterranean Archives.” In collaboration with Hors champ, as part of the Cinémathèque Québécoise’s Experimental Cinema Symposium, May 31, Montréal.

2024 | Beirut, The Encounter

A fundraiser and Lebanon solidarity screening, Oct. 25, Critical Media Lab, McGill University, Montréal.

2024 | Resistance, Why?

A fundraiser and Palestine solidarity screening, Oct. 4, La Sala Rossa, Montréal.

2023-2024 | The Political Aesthetic: Displacing Resistance, Resisting Displacement

A screening series that explores the notions of displacement, refuge, and artistic resistance through the medium of the moving image. With the support of the Feminist Media Studio, October 2023-April 2024, La lumière Collective, Montréal.

2023 |Gaza: Between Images and Bodies

 A screening event featuring a program of short experimental films that examine the tensions inherent in witnessing genocide, and the contradiction between the abstraction of representation and the embodied reality of colonial violence. November 24, Sala Rossa, Montréal.

2021 | Queer for Palestine

A screening event featuring a program of queer Arab films that explore the intersection of gender and sexual identity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. In collaboration with Cinema Politica. Nov. 15, La Sala Rossa, Montréal. 

2021 | Revolution Until Victory

A Palestine solidarity outdoor screening, in collaboration with Le Sémaphore collective. September 8, Montréal.

2020 | Beyrouth plusieurs fois/Beirut over and over again

A fundraiser and Lebanon solidarity outdoor screening, in collaboration with Le Sémaphore collective and Hors champ. August 27, Montreal. 

2016 | Dissonant Integrations

A multimedia group exhibition that critically engaged with dominant representations of race, ethnicity, and other forms of fixed identities. Organized as part of the Ethnocultural Art Histories Research project, March 5-April 2, Z Art Space, Montréal.