MA Candidates in Near Eastern Studies

Ghost in the Machine: Otherworldly Mediterranean Crossings

This project, creative in nature, probes the stakes of migration from North Africa across the Mediterranean by juxtaposing the supernatural and the technological—the ghosts haunting the ocean and the drones policing its shores—framing the sea through the Islamic conception of barzakh, a waystation between life and death. 

*(Not featured).

Faces of Diaspora

This project explores the ways African governments and institutions like Ethiopia and the African Union have incorporated and utilized narratives of diasporic belonging within their administrations.

Agricultural labor migration between Mexico and the US

My project examines the migration of Mexican farmworkers to the U.S., focusing on labor conditions to explore broader questions of development, poverty, labor standards, and global inequality, with an emphasis on the role of migration in agricultural labor and its impact on poverty.

Shifting Borders

This collaborative documentary explores how movement and restriction shapes the lives of people living in the US- Mexico border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas.

Cinema Is Not a Luxury: A Feminist Diasporic Rewriting of Latin American Cineastes Prudencia Grifell and Margot Benacerraf 

This project recasts the histories of the first two Venezuelan female filmmakers through a feminist diasporic lens. Anez is creatively addressing their absence from film history and reinterpreting it in light of the country’s current migrant crisis through a video essay as a method to further interrogate archival materials.