Montiana Ashour

Montiana Ashour is a PhD student in the department of Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Canada. Her research rethinks Arab popular cinema through the realms of visual culture and affective geographies. She explores the interplay between cinematic image and everyday activities, looking closely at how this interplay resists dominant geopolitical constructs and foregrounds questions of agency, subjectivity and desire within a global imaginary. 

Montiana presented on Emirati cinematic hybridity at NYU-Abu Dhabi, and was also a respondent at McGill’s Media Rurality conference. She served as adjunct faculty in the College of Media and Communication Studies at Zayed University-UAE (2018-2020), and has 7 years of experience in television and video production in the MENA region. 

Currently, Montiana co-organizes the Work-in-Progress series for the year 2022-23, and is on the editorial board for the Gem’s Lab open-access periodical In Progress.