26th February, 2016
6:00PM to 7:30PM
at Tariq Rafi Lecture Theater – Habib University
Abstract:
In this talk, Sadia Shepard and Cassim Shepard will speak about their respective multimedia practices. Raised in a family of designers and artists, this pair of siblings each tells stories in a variety of ways. As a writer and filmmaker, Sadia works with and expands the conventions of memoir, short fiction, and documentary film in order to explore questions of identity, intercultural translation, and place. As an urbanist, Cassim uses online journalism, video installation, and scholarly writing to investigate how the design and management of urban environments reflects cultural and political attitudes. On Friday February 26th, they will share a brief overview of their work and talk about how to choose the appropriate medium to tell a particular story.
Sadia Shepard is an author and documentary film producer. Her credits as a film producer include The September Issue, an inside look at Vogue, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Excellence in Cinematography at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and The Education of Mohammed Hussain, a portrait of a traditional Muslim school in Detroit, MI, which was nominated for a 2014 International Documentary Association Award. Her new documentary series The Other Half of Tomorrow introduces us to the disparate contexts that make up Pakistan’s complex culture — from a women’s rights’ workshop in a village in rural Punjab, to an underground dance academy in Karachi, to the playing fields of the Pakistan Women’s Cricket Team. Shepard’s first book, The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir, was published by The Penguin Press in 2008. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Times of India, Wall Street Journal Magazine and The New York Times. She teaches undergraduate creative writing at Hunter College and documentary film production at Wesleyan University
Cassim Shepard produces non-fiction media about cities, buildings and places. As the founding editor-in-chief of Urban Omnibus, an online publication of The Architectural League of New York, he spent six years working with hundreds of local architects, designers, artists, writers, and public servants to share their stories of urban innovation, with a particular emphasis on housing, infrastructure, and the changing nature of cultural institutions. His film and video work has been screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Ford Foundation, and the United Nations, among many other venues around the world. His writing on urbanism has appeared in Next City, Places, Domus, Public Culture, as well as in several books and catalogues. Shepard teaches in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and has been a guest lecturer in the Cities Programme of the London School of Economics and a Poiesis Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He studied filmmaking at Harvard University, urban geography at Kings College London, and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
