In conjunction with BAMPFA’s presentation of What We Left Unfinished, please join us for a livestream conversation and Q&A with writer/director Mariam Ghani and UC Berkeley PhD candidate Sherine Ebadi, moderated by Associate Professor, Southeast Asian Studies, Penny Edwards. 

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her films and installations have been presented and collected by museums, festivals, and biennials worldwide, notably the Guggenheim, MoMA, and Metropolitan museums; the Berlinale, Rotterdam, DOC NYC, and CPH:DOX film festivals; Documenta 13, and the Lahore, Liverpool, and Sharjah biennials. She teaches at Bennington College and is currently in production on her second feature, DIS-EASE.

Sherine Ebadi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. Her research explores nationalist politics in the context of post-communist Central Asia. Working with Afghan refugees in North America and Europe, Ebadi specifically considers how gender and Muslim identities inform nation-building through transnational ideals of feminism and freedom. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, the UC Consortium for Black Studies, and the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship.

Penny Edwards is an Associate Professor in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. In her research on culture, history, literature, and memory in Southeast Asia and the diaspora she grapples with the question of the historian as unreliable narrator. Edwards is author of numerous publications including the award winning Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation (1860–1945), and the forthcoming Kingdoms of the Mind on the Myingun Prince of Burma. Edwards directs Introduction to Civilizations of Mainland Southeast Asia (SEA10A), the gateway course to UC Berkeley’s South & Southeast Asian Studies major. She has been recognized for her excellence as an educator with a 2013 Award for Outstanding Faculty Mentoring of Graduate Student Instructors, and she is the recipient of the 2021 Edwards Carol D. Soc Distinguished Mentoring Award.