Salma Shamel is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Her dissertation is located between three traditions: media studies, intellectual history, and political theory. Her work revisits legal trials against militants and communists in postcolonial Egypt to rethink the performativity of disagreement and the relationship between theory and practice. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation. She did her BA in Media Art at the German University in Cairo and received her MA at The School of Art and Design History and Theory at The New School. She is a core member of the Mosireen Media Collective in Egypt, and a co-founder of the 858 archive. Her work has appeared in Rethinking Marxism, The Derivative (by Beirut Art Center), Aljumhuriya, Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, and others.
An artist by training, her experimental video work has been shown at Crossroads at SFMOMA, European Media Art Festival in Germany, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Scotland, Cámara Lúcida in Ecuador, Cairo Video Festival in Egypt, CODEC Festival Internacional de Cine Experimental y Vídeo in Mexico, Athens International Film and Video in Ohio, and more.