Nehad Toloui-Semnani

Nehad Khader (2019) is a filmmaker, curator, editor and writer whose work in film informs her work as a historian and vice versa. Trained in media and literature by black and Palestinian creators, Nehad believes in art that carries aesthetic excellence as well as social and political significance. She is the senior programmer at Philadelphia’s BlackStar Film Festival and served as the curator of the DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival for six years until transitioning into an advisory role. She served as the managing editor of the Journal of Palestine Studiesfor five years. Nehad is a 2017 Flaherty Film Seminar fellow, a 2017 Leeway Transformation Award winner and a 2018 Tribeca Film Institute fellow. She was selected by the Palestine Film Institute to participate in the inaugural Palestine Pavilion and the Cannes Producer’s Network at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. In 2018 she produced David Felix Sutcliffe’s “White Fright,” now streaming on The Guardianwebsite.

Nehad is currently directing her first feature-length documentary, “Unbowed.” The film depicts the untold life story of an iconic 70-year-old revolutionary that reinserts women into the history of the Palestinian resistance. Surviving torture, trauma and exile, she restarts her life after a political deportation. During the Logan Nonfiction Program, Nehad will be editing a trailer for the film as well as sorting through and organizing the video, photo and document archives that she’s collected over the past several months.