Alissar Seyla

Alissar Seyla is a Lebanese woman who also identifies as South West Asian and North African (SWANA). A visual artist, writer and researcher, she makes work to reimagine her lived experiences of war, violence, and transgenerational trauma in relationship with tender and disturbing aspects of social ecologies and cultural fantasy. Merging community work and a PhD in Public Health with an interdisciplinary practice, she educates about cultural safety and anti-racism, and creates poetry and cultural criticism across academic and community spaces. Alissar founded and curates Rage Café, a group that meets infrequently to explore and uplift SWANA art and intellectual movements as a way of caring for communities in grief and combating harmful portrayals of Arabs and their homelands in mainstream media. She is interested in equitable, non-exploitative research structures and processes, particularly with refugee and immigrant communities in countries of the global minority.