Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi
Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi lives in Brussels and works across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. She is particularly committed to supporting young choreographers, whom she mentors and showcases at various festivals.
Born in Algiers and based in Brussels, Nedjma Benchelabi is a curator and dramaturge. She has collaborated on various artistic projects with Théâtre de la Ville in Brussels and KVS. Since 2009, she has been a programme manager at Les Halles de Schaerbeek, contributing to the visibility of contemporary artists from the Arab world. In 2012, she curated the Moroccan contemporary art season Daba Maroc.
Since 2014, she has been the programme manager of the international contemporary dance festival On Marche in Marrakech and, in this context, the artistic coordinator of the Biennale of Dance in Africa (Marrakech 2021). She has also been associated with D-CAF, a multidisciplinary festival in Cairo, for the project Arab Art Focus (2016–2018). Committed to supporting and showcasing the performing arts in the SWANA region and in Europe, she has curated the Tashwesh Festival in Cairo and Brussels (2017–2018), the Halaqat programme (2022), and the project Un Controlled Gesture (since 2019), as well as coordinating the Mahmoud Darwish Legacy programme.
She is actively involved in performing arts projects, working in dramaturgy, research and documentation, exhibition curation and publishing.
Samaa Wakim
Choreographer and performer Samaa Wakim grew up in the occupied Palestinian territories. Growing up in a war zone means living in constant proximity to politics and violence, and her work draws directly from this experience.
A Palestinian artist and cultural professional, she holds a degree in theatre from the University of Haifa. A member of Yaa Samar! Dance Theater (YSDT) and Khashabi Theater, Samaa Wakim is currently focused on developing original creations while touring internationally with Losing It, a collaborative dance-theatre piece co-created with Samar Haddad King; Milk, produced by Khashabi Theater and presented at the Avignon Festival; and Gathering, produced by YSDT.
She has taken part in numerous local and international productions, including I am Yusuf and This is My Brother; The Beloved; Badke; Bound; Against a Hard Surface; The Last Ward with YSDT; and The Cabaret, directed by Bashar Murkus at Khashabi Theater.
She was also the producer of the Haifa Independent Film Festival (2020–2021). Alongside her work as a performer, cultural manager, and producer, she leads workshops locally and internationally that combine dance, theatre and traditional and political elements. In addition to her multidisciplinary artistic practice, she identifies as a cultural and political activist.
Samira Negrouche
Born in Algiers, where she lives, Samira Negrouche is a poet, essayist, and translator. Trained as a doctor, she has devoted herself to writing. A major voice in Algerian poetry, her work has been translated into some thirty languages, and she maintains an active international literary presence.
Interdisciplinary creation forms a significant part of her career. She has collaborated with the singer and musician Angélique Ionatos, the artist Marc Giai-Miniet, the theorbist Bruno Helstoffer, and the choreographer Fatou Cissé. She has carried out extensive translation work, bringing contemporary Arabic and English poetry into French. In 1999, she founded the cultural association Cadmos, dedicated to Mediterranean culture, and has organised numerous literary and artistic events in Algiers and other cities.
From 2008 to 2012, she coordinated and developed the Spring of Poets in Algeria, and from 2008 to 2015 she was a member of the international committee of the Voix de la Méditerranée festival (Lodève). She is regularly invited to international literary events, where she contributes not only through readings, lectures, and performances, but also through her work in coordination and organisation.
In 2023, she published her translation of Nathalie Handal’s collection De l’amour des étranges chevaux, along with two personal anthologies, J’habite en mouvement and Stations. In 2025, Pente Raide, co-written with Marin Fouqué, was published by Actes Sud. In November 2025, she received the Benjamin Fondane International Prize for Francophone Literature.
Imane Elkabli
Imane Elkabli is a Moroccan dancer and performer who studied philosophy before moving into dance. Her artistic practice explores emotion and self-discovery through the body and movement, often incorporating a range of materials to deepen and expand her artistic vision. Her first solo, Aït Al-Awda, was presented at the On Marche festival in Marrakech in 2025. Since 2022, she has also served as coordinator of the Marrakech Short Film Festival.
Amina Abouelghar
Amina Abouelghar is a dancer and choreographer currently based in Brussels and Cairo. Trained at the Cairo Contemporary Dance Centre, she has presented her work at events such as Next Festival, the Indiscipline Festival organized by WIELS (Centre for Contemporary Art), the To Be Festival in Antwerp, D-CAF (Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival) in Cairo, and the Festival de Marseille in 2024 with the Nafaq collective, of which she is a member.
She created her solo Young Dreams in Belgium in 2023, and its tour continues in 2025. She is currently preparing her next creation.
Rym Hayouni
With a background in drama and physical theatre, Rym Hayouni has focused on performance since 2019. She explores the intersection between a physical vocabulary and a range of expressive forms, working with space, objects, materials, sound, video, and audiences, and connecting the political with the poetic.
Her work, which she develops both nationally and internationally, has led her to create site-specific interventions in spaces she understands as fundamentally political.
Eman Hussein
Eman Hussein is a dancer, choreographer, and dance filmmaker based in Cairo and Zurich. She has studied dance, street arts, theatre and martial arts. Her creations merge the everyday movements of workers with contemporary dance, among other artistic forms.
Working with people outside formal artistic institutions is her primary source of inspiration. She collaborates with artisans and workers, sharing their daily lives in order to observe and learn their movements in their workshops. Her dance films explore the relationship between public space and contemporary dance and have been presented and awarded internationally.
Safaa Balouchi
Safaa Balouchi is an interdisciplinary artist working in Muscat, Berlin, and Chabahar. Her practice encompasses performance, installation, textiles and visual storytelling, and is grounded in a tactile exploration of identity, memory, and the ways materials can occupy space and transcend temporal boundaries.
Influenced by her Baluchi heritage, she reflects on how bodies navigate belonging, adaptation, and resistance within inherited landscapes and systems of meaning. Through site-specific narratives and the performative construction of worlds, she works with layered environments combining sound, fabric and movement, often repurposing discarded or recycled materials. With a background in digital and spatial design, she brings an intuitive sensitivity to material engagement across diverse contexts. Her work has been presented regionally and internationally, including in Berlin, Cairo, Muscat, Sharjah, Riyadh, Turku, and Düsseldorf.
Noor Abed
Noor Abed, born in 1988 in Palestine, develops her work at the intersection of performance and cinema. She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2015–2016) and the Home Workspace Programme (HWP) at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2016–2017).
Her work has been presented and screened internationally, including at Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival (Tunisia), the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic), the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, the Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam.
In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective based in Ramallah. She served as assistant curator for documenta 15 in Kassel (2021–2022) and was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2022 to 2024.
Nancy Mounir
Nancy Mounir is a versatile musician, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and composer, and a major figure in Egypt’s alternative music scene. She composes original music for theatre, film, and international art installations. She plays numerous instruments, including violin, piano, bass, theremin, and traditional Egyptian flute.
She recently gained wider recognition with her first solo album, Nozhet El Nofous, a transcendent work that reimagines century-old archival recordings.
