Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at the Centre for Global Media and Communication at SOAS, University of London. She is the chair of the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, and the founding editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Matar is the author of What it means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood and the co-editor of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (with Zahera Harb). 

Venetia Porter is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art and at The British Museum. She was formerly Senior Curator for Islamic and Contemporary Middle East art at The British Museum and the lead curator for the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World, which opened 2018. Her publications include Artists Making Books: Poetry to Politics, Reflections, Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa (with Natasha Morris and Charles Tripp), Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (ed.) and Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East.