Join the Middle East Institute for “Human Life is Sacred, Art is not”: a Conversation with Samar Haddad King.
About the event:
How does war live in the body, and what can dance register that testimony cannot? The Gender, Art and Body Politics series continues with Samar Haddad King, choreographer, composer and founding artistic director of Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre, which has worked between New York and Palestine since 2011. Her recent pieces include Losing It, co-created with Samaa Wakim, Last Ward and Gathering. In conversation with Kathryn Spellman Poots and Nadje Al-Ali, King will discuss the gendered body as an archive of political violence, working across borders and checkpoints, and making Palestinian art in a time of genocide.
About the Artist:
Samar Haddad King, artistic/founding director of YSDT, graduated from the Ailey/Fordham BFA program under the tutelage of Kazuko Hirabayashi. Her work has been performed in 22 countries on five continents, with commissions throughout the US and abroad including Hong Kong Arts Festival (Hong Kong), Hubbard Street 2 (Chicago), Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival (Ramallah), and large scale public works for The Walk/St. Ann’s Warehouse (New York), Good Chance Theatre (Marseille), and The Herds (Paris). Awards and fellowships include the Prix des Jeunes Créateurs Palestiniens pour la Diversité des Expressions Artistiques (Palest’In & Out Festival, Paris), La Fabrique Chaillot Residency (Chaillot – Théâtre national de la Danse, Paris), The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and Toulmin Creator (CBA/National Sawdust, NYC). Samar is a 2023 Creative Capital Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact awardee. She is currently focusing on her premiere of Beiti (Jerusalem, Yabbous, Summer 2026)- a video installation project on the definition of home through storytelling and movement- and Shabaab (Geneva, Festival La Batie, Fall 2026) a multidisciplinary work with spoken text, dance, and puppetry celebrating the intimacy, beauty, and tenderness of Arab male friendship.
About the Hosts:
Kathryn Spellman Poots is the academic program director and associate professor adj. at the Middle East Institute, Columbia University. Her research interests include Muslim diasporic communities, refugees and transnational migration networks, and gendered ritual performances.
Her publications include the monograph: “Religion and Nation: Iranian Local and Transnational Networks in Britain” (Berghahn Publishers, Oxford and New York) and the edited volumes: “Gender, Governance and Islam” (Edinburgh University Press), “The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond” (Edinburgh University Press) and “Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices” (Edinburgh University Press).
Nadje Al-Ali is Nancy Duke Lewis Chair in Gender Studies and Anthropology at Brown University. Her research focuses on feminist activism and gendered mobilization in Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey and in the Kurdish political movement. Her books include “Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East (2000), Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present” (2007) and “What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq” (with Nicola Pratt, 2009). She co-edited “We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War” with Deborah Al-Najjar, which won the 2014 Arab American Book Award for non-fiction. Her most recent co-edited volume is “Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe: Queer Feminist Critiques” (with Tunay Altay and Katharina Galor, 2024).