Yassin Adnan

Yassin Adnan is a journalist, poet, and novelist.

He is the presenter of the weekly cultural TV program ‘Macharif’ on the 1st Moroccan TV channel (TVM). Some of his works include: I almost can’t see collection of poems, Dar Al Nahda, Beirut 2007, The shadow’s apples, short story collection, Benmsik University, Casablanca 2006, The Pavement of resurrection, collection of poems, Al-Mada Books, Damascus, 2003, Who believes in letters?, short story collection, Mirit Books, Cairo, 2001, Mannequins, collection of poems, edited by the Union of Moroccan Writers, Casablanca, 2000 and Under The Sheltering Sky of North Africa, forthcoming in English.

James Dearden

James Dearden wrote and directed his first film in 1977, an 8 minute short THE CONTRAPTION, which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. He went on to direct two more short films, PANIC (22 min) and DIVERSION (45 min). He directed his first feature length film for HBO in 1983, THE COLD ROOM, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Avoriaz Film Festival. In 1986 he adapted his short film DIVERSION as a feature length screenplay for Paramount Pictures. It was re-titled FATAL ATTRACTION and won him an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay in 1988. In 1987 he directed his adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s PASCALI’S ISLAND, with Ben Kingsley, Charles Dance and Helen Mirren. It was selected for the official competition at Cannes the following year. In 1991 he wrote and directed A KISS BEFORE DYING, with Matt Dillon and Sean Young, for Universal Studios, adapted from the novel by Ira Levin. In 1998 he wrote and directed ROGUE TRADER, with Ewan McGregor in the true story of derivatives trader Nick Leeson, who single-handedly destroyed Barings, the oldest private bank in the world.

Faouzi Bensaidi

Faouzi Bensaidi is a Moroccan film director and writer. After working in the theater as a writer and actor, he made his first short film in 1997, entitled “La Falaise”, that received 23 prizes in French and international festivals. In 2000, he made two short films: ” “Le Mur”, featured in the Cannes festival and “Trajets” featured in the Venice festival. In 2003 he made his first feature film “Mille Mois”, which received a special mention at the festival of Cannes and has been distributed in about ten countries. In 2006 his second film “www-what a wonderful world” participated in the Venice festival section: “Venice Days” and has been distributed in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Denmark.

Walter Lassally

Walter Lassally was born in Berlin in 1926 and came to England as a refugee in 1939, two months before the outbreak of World War II. He continued his education there up to Inter BSc standard, when he started to focus on his ambition of becoming a cameraman. In 1954 he filmed his first feature, “Another Sky”, in Marrakech. He was part of the Free Cinema movement in the 50s, when he also made six features with the Greek director, Michael Cacoyannis, culminating in Zorba the Greek, for which he won an Oscar.

He was Head of Camera at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, U.K. from 1988 to 1992. He served on the juries of a number of festivals, including the European Film Award and the cinematographers’ festivals Camerimage in Poland and Madridimagen in Spain. He has by now filmed over 70 features and TV films.

Deborah Moggach

Deborah Moggach’s many screenplays include the BAFTA-nominated “Pride and Prejudice” and BBC’s “Goggle-Eyes”, which won the Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted TV Series. Her 17 novels include the best selling “Tulip Fever”, which was bought by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks, and “These Foolish Things” which is to be filmed in India this winter. She has just adapted Anne Frank’s Diary for BBC1.

Sussan Deyhim

Composer/vocalist/actor. Best known for her CDs Mad Man of God and Majoun with Richard Horowitz; her work on Unfaithful, Sleeper Cell, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Kite Runner and Any Given Sunday and her long collaborations with Shirin Neshat including TURBULENT winner of the Venice Golden Lion. She also collaborates with Eve Ensler, Bobby McFarin, Ornette Coleman, Bill Laswell among others. She was a member of The Bejart Ballet and The Pars National Ballet of Iran.

Farida Benlyazid

Moroccan-born filmmaker Farida Benlyazid earned her degree in film and literature from the University of Paris in 1974. Since then, she has worked as a screenwriter and as a director. Benlyazid is one of the very few working female directors from North Africa, she has written and directed the films Bab al-sama’ maftuh (The Door to the Sky) 1987, which was selected for a number of international festivals, and Kayd insa’ (Women’s Wiles) which won the film of the year in 1999 in Morocco and was selected at a number of international festivals.

Jodi Bieber

Jodi Bieber deals with intimacy in her photographs, with the personal and the sensitive concerns of individuals dealing with compromising or conflicting circumstances. Focusing in this way, she works both in an art context, and for non-profit organisations like MSF and Amnesty International. Her work has recently been published in a book entitled Between Dogs and Wolves – Growing up in South Africa. Bieber has received eight World Press Photo awards, a gold award at the Society of Publications Designers Awards for her work covering the Ebola crisis in Uganda, and a best cover design at the British Media Awards for her project on domestic violence in South Africa.

John Boorman

John Boorman is a British filmmaker best known for his feature films such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, The General and In My Country. He had been nominated for 5 Oscars and won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for his film The General.

Ruth Charney

Ruth Charney started her career as a film producer in 1992 with Barry Primus' "Mistress", starring Robert DeNiro, Robert Wuhl, Eli Wallach, and Martin Landau. In 1993, she produced Richard Glatzer's "Grief" with Illeana Douglas and Craig Chester. In 1995, she produced David Salle's "Search & Destroy" with Dennis Hopper, Griffin Dunne, Ethan Hawk, and Christopher Walken. This was the first of 2 films that she produced with Martin Scorsese. The second was Allison Anders’ "Grace of My Heart" in 1996. In 2001, she produced the Sundance Film Festival award-winner "The Sleepy Time Gal". In 2001, she produced Todd Louiso's Sundance Film Festival award-winner "Love Liza" . In 2004, she produced with InDiGent films and IFC, Alan Taylor's "Kill the Poor" and Jennie Livingston's short film, "Who's the Top?"

Sarah Curtis

Sarah has been an independent feature film producer for fifteen years. Her most recent feature is ‘Run Fat Boy Run’ for Material Entertainment, starring Simon Pegg and Thandie Newton, directed by David Schwimmer, which opened in September 2007. Sarah also produced ‘On a Clear Day’, starring Peter Mullan, Brenda Blethyn and Billy Boyd which opened the Sundance Film Festival. ‘On a Clear Day’ won two Scottish BAFTAS in 2006, Best Screenplay and Best Film. Her previous film credits include ‘Charlotte Gray’, ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘The Governess’, ‘Mrs Brown’, ‘The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain’.

William Dalrymple

William Dalyrmple is a British writer and historian, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society. His books include the highly acclaimed bestseller ‘In Xanadu’, ‘City of Djinns’ and ‘From the Holy Mountain’. White Mughals was published in 2003, the book won the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Prize, and was shortlisted for the PEN History Award, the Kiryama Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2007, The Last Moghal won the prestigous Duff Cooper Prize for History and

Ross Douglas

Ross Douglas is the Director of Artlogic. Artlogic is a communication company based in Johannesburg South Africa that accesses audiences through art. By selling branding rights to high profile companies that want to position their brand at the top of their industry we are able to take art into public spaces. Artlogic will be producing the first African Contemporary art fair in Johannesburg for March 2008. Artlogic events have been performed in major venues around the world; Central Park New York, Guggenheim Berlin, Barbican London, Rome, National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne and in a host of venues in South Africa including Constitution Hill in Johannesburg.

Edmond El Maleh

El Maleh was born in Safi to a Jewish family from Essaouira. He moved to Paris in 1965, working there as a journalist and a teacher of philosophy. He only began writing in 1980, at the age of 63, traveling back and forth between France and Morocco. He states that, in spite of his long stay in France, he has devoted his entire literary life to Morocco. Since 1999 he has lived in Rabat. Since his first novel – Le parcours immobile (1983) – he has published seven novels and a book about the painting of Cherkaoui. His works are the fruit of a Jewish and Arab memory, which celebrates the cultural symbiosis of a Morocco that is Berber, Arab and Jewish at the same time.

Hamid Fardjad

Hamid Fardjad was born in Teharan in 1942. After completing his university studies in Madrid and the United States, he joined the National Institute of Performing Arts in Brussels. He was the assistant to F. Rahnama and and other Iranian directors between 1958 and 1962, and to François Reichenbach in 1968. He was also a theatre director in New York where he founded the school ‘Dunya’. After stage directing from 1982 to 1990 in New York, he completed his first short film El Dorado, selected for the Berlin Film Festival. He directed Peter Ustinov in Animalwise, and directed Rainbow Trans, which focused on gnaoua music and also a medium-length film about Judaism in Morocco. He has also produced and collaborated with Shirin Neshat on eight films and produced the film Secret and absurd, which was selected for the Tribeca Film Festival and opened the cinéma du futur in Lille 2004. He is currently teaching at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels in Marrakech.

David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt is a definite frontrunner in both South African and global photography. His work, spanning over 35 years of practice, has consistently observed and commented on the social and political developments within South African society. Goldblatt has recently been awarded the most prestigious photography prize in the world, The Hasselblad Photography Award. He is the only South African artist to win this prize. His photographs are in the collections of the South African National Gallery, Cape Town; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has published several books of his work, and is an established marker of quality in contemporary South African photography.

Richard E. Grant

Born and brought up in Swaziland, South-East Africa. Since appearing in WITHNAIL AND I directed by Bruce Robinson in 1986, Richard E. Grant has been in 34 films and worked with directors including Francis Ford Coppolla, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Jane Campion and Phillip Kauffman. Published two books of film diaries – WITH NAILS and WAH-WAH as well as a novel – BY DESIGN. Wrote and directed his autobiographical film WAH-WAH released in 2006.

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to the US at the age of eighteen to study at Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He then worked as a management consultant in New York, and later as a freelance journalist back in Lahore. His first novel was Moth Smoke (2000), winner of a Betty Trask Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Moth Smoke was made into a television mini-series in Pakistan and an operetta in Italy, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2007 his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was published and shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. A short story based on the novel was also published in The Paris Review in 2006. Mohsin Hamid now lives in London.

Sally Hampson

Artist/designer, Sally Hampson works with narratives, creating collections of objects, photographs, film footage and garments in a desire to make the narrative more tangible and bring it into the present. For the storytelling event at Riad Magi, she has created a storyteller’s coat that will be made to surround the narrator, with colour and texture as the story is told.

Christopher Hampton

Christopher Hampton is a British playwright, screen writer and film director. He is best known for his play based on the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the film Dangerous Liaisons. He received an Academy Award, BAFTA, Writer’s Guild Award and Critic’s Circle Award for the screenplay. Novels he has adapted for film also include The Honorary Consul (1984) and The Quiet American (2002) by Graham Greene; and Atonement by Ian McEwan, which has just been released.

Richard Horowitz

Golden Globe winning composer. Credits include: Any Given Sunday, The Sheltering Sky, Three Seasons, Majoun (Sony Classical CD) and Logic of the Birds with Sussan Deyhim and Shirin Neshat. Cofounder and artistic director of The Gnaoua Festival in Essaouira. Mentored by Paul Bowles. Recent projects include Meeting Resistence, Aisha Kandisah and The Whisperers.

Pieter Hugo

Pieter Hugo has excelled in the photographic portraiture field, investigating particular cultures and geographic areas to find the unique and unusual. With his series Hyena Men and The Albino Portraits, Hugo became well-recognised and described as “ one of the hottest, freshest contemporary artists to emerge from Cape Town” (Artthrob April 2006). Hugo has received several prestigious awards, including first prize in the portraiture section of World Press Photo 2006 and the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2007. For the AiM show, works from Hugo’s series entitled Messina/Musina have been selected. The portraits from this series depict family groups who live in Musina, a town on the border of South Africa and Zimbabwe. The town has historically attracted a mix of contrasting races, classes and cultures, and the photographs explore these distinct and particular groups, showing them as a microcosm of societies confronted with transition and transience.

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004) and My Revolutions (2007). His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and won him prizes including the Somerset Maugham award, the Betty Trask prize of the Society of Authors and a British Book Award. In 2003 Granta named him one of its Best of Young British novelists. He sits on the Executive Council of English PEN.

Nick Laird

Nick Laird is a lawyer, poet, novelist and critic from Northern Ireland. His essays, reviews and poems have appeared in various journals in Britain and America, including The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Believer, New Writing 11 and New Writing 13. His debut collection of poetry, To A Fault, and his first novel, Utterly Monkey, were published in 2005. To A Fault was shortlisted for the 2005 Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, and Utterly Monkey for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Nick Laird’s second collection of poetry is On Purpose (2007). He is also working on a second novel, Glover’s Mistake, due for publication in 2008.

Santu Mofoken

Santu Mofokeng has been described by international curator Simon Njami as ‘one of the most important photographers of his generation’. He began his career as a street photographer in Soweto during the apartheid era, and has since worked both in a research and documentary context, and within a contemporary art environment. Mofokeng’s work deals with issues of representation and history. Mofokengs work has been featured in major exhibitions around the world, including “Rethinking Landscapes” presented at the Fifth International African Photography Festival in Bamako, Mali in 2003, and in Paris, France the following year. He has also had exhibitions in China, Belgium, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States.

Daniel Morden

Only a few people can say that they earn their living telling stories, but since 1989 Daniel Morden has travelled the world as a professional storyteller visiting arts centres, theatres, libraries, museums and festivals worldwide. Daniel Morden was born and lives in Wales and draws on Welsh folklore in both his writing and storytelling. He has also traveled widely creating books and performances about his story sharing projects in Haiti, Hawaii and the Yukon. His first book, Weird Tales from the Storyteller, was published by Pont Books in November 2003.

Zwelethu Mthethwa

Zwelethu Mthethwa is one of South Africa’s best known artists, utilising both photography and printing in his creative practice. Born in Durban in 1960, he first gained recognition when he received the Fulbright scholarship and completed his studies at the Rochester Institute in the USA. He has since gained both local and international acclaim, exhibiting in numerous solo and group shows internationally, notably at the Museum of African Art in New York and Africa Remix. Mthethwa is best known for his vivid colour and black and white photographs, which take on a painterly quality with their sensitivity to texture, aesthetic and colouring. He is represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. For the AiM photographic show, Mthethwa will be exhibiting new works taken in the Nampula province of northern Mozambique. The subjects of his portraits are artisanal miners, who dig for semi precious quartz stone found in this area.

Zanele Muhole

Zanele Muhole came into public awareness with her solo exhibition ‘Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture’ held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2004. Her work deals with intimacy and vulnerability, and well as strength and solidarity in black homosexual society. She has received numerous awards, including the Tollman Award and the BHP Billiton/Wits University Visual Arts Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited locally and internationally, and has been a point of interest and controversy on many occasions. Muhole was born in Durban in 1972, and currently lives and works in Johannesburg.

Sam Neave

Sam Neave is an Iranian film director. His first feature film "Cry Funny Happy" was debuted at the Sundance Film Festival 2003, featuring Iranian actress Marjan Neshat and actress Amy Redford, daughter of Sundance Film Festival founder and legendary actor, Robert Redford. His latest film is ‘First Person Singular’.

Mark Peploe

Mark Peploe began writing screenplays in 1969 and has collaborated amongst otherts with Jacques Demy, Rene Clement, Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci. His principal credits include Antonioni’s The Passenger (1974) and The Last Emperor (1987) with Bernardo Bertolucci, for which he won the Golden Globe and an Academy Award. In 1997 he made Victory from the novel by Joseph Conrad with Willem Dafoe and Irene Jacob, which was an official selection at the San Sebastian festival. For Bertolucci he adapted The Sheltering Sky (1990) from the Paul Bowles novel, and worked on Little Buddha (1993). He has written the script for Bertolucci’s next film based on the life of the 16th century Neapolitan composer Gesualdo da Venosa, and is presently developing an action-thriller called The Crew from a story by Antonioni.

Simon Prosser

Simon Prosser is Publishing Director of Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books, where his authors include Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Kiran Desai, Ali Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Hari Kunzru and Jeanette Winterson. He is also a founder director of the Port Eliot Lit Fest.

Gabriel Range

Gabriel Range is a writer, director and producer based in London. In 2003, he was nominated for a BAFTA for Best New Director for his film The Day Britain Stopped, a drama told in the style of a documentary for BBC2. His last film, Death of a President, which imagined the assassination of President George Bush, won the International Critics Prize at the Toronto Film Festival and has since been nominated for an International Emmy. Current projects include a thriller he has written for Paramount, which Lorenzo de Bonaventura is set to produce, an original screenplay by Jake Arnott, and an Afghan ‘Western’ for Film4.

Tahir Shah

Tahir Shah is a writer, documentary maker, and champion of what he calls "the East-West Bridge". Tahir Shah is the author of more than ten books and several documentary films. His books have appeared in more than a dozen languages and his films have been screened on National Geographic Channel, Channel 4, and The History Channel, as well as in cinemas worldwide. His latest book is The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca, where he lives with his wife two children. Shah is regarded as an author with a uniquely observant eye for people, places and for detail. He is currently working on a book about the vision of Mohammed VI of Morocco, and is researching the role and power of storytelling in Morocco and the Arab World for a book that will be entitled In Arabian Nights.

Hardeep Singh Kohli

Hardeep is a writer, comedian, actor, presenter, director and cartographer. He is currently working as a regular presenter/contributor for both BBC TV and Radio shows, has his own column in the Scotsman on Sunday and is a guest columnist for The Guardian.

Zadie Smith

Her acclaimed first novel, White Teeth (2000), is a vibrant portrait of contemporary multicultural London, told through the story of three ethnically diverse families. The book won a number of awards and prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). It also won two EMMA (BT Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards) for Best Book/Novel and Best Female Media Newcomer, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Author’s Club First Novel Award. White Teeth has been translated into over twenty languages and was adapted for Channel 4 television for broadcast in autumn 2002. Zadie Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), a story of loss, obsession and the nature of celebrity, won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2003 she was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in 2005, and won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also written a non-fiction book about writing – Fail Better (2006).

Iain Softley

Iain Softley has been directing and producing feature films for thirteen years, his work spanning diverse genres and styles.He received wide acclaim for his feature film debut, Backbeat (1994), which he both wrote and directed. The visually powerful and culturally prescient romantic thriller Hackers followed in 1995, starring Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie. His 1997 adaptation of the Henry James novel, The Wings of the Dove (Miramax), received seventeen nominations and sixteen awards, including four Academy Award nominations and two Bafta Awards. Softley is now working on the fantasy Inkheart as director and producer; this is currently in post-production and is slated for a September 2008 release by New Line Cinema.

Mikhael Subotsky

Mikhael Subotsky, 25, is a rapidly rising star of photography. His final year university project, entitled Die Vier Hoeke consisted of an in-depth study of the South African prison system. It has received widespread acclaim both in South African and internationally, winning the 2007 Paul Hoff Award 2007, the Special Jurors Award at the 2005 Vles Recontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamako and the 2006 F25 Award for Concerned Photography. His subsequent work has looked at the small Karoo town of Beaufort West, and has been exhibited in Cape Town, Amsterdam and Verona.

Guy Tillim

Guy Tillim represents the crossover between art and photojournalism, the possibility of showing informative, media driven image in a creative, gallery context. He accesses situations of war and upheaval, areas that have a history of the tragic and the violent, and presents them in a way that seems both simple and elaborate. This approach is fresh and effective, and has been rewarded through awards including the Prix Societe Civile des Auteurs Multimedia Roger Pic in 2002, the Higashikawa Overseas Photographer Award (Japan) in 2003, the 2004 DaimlerChrysler Award for South African photography, and the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 2005. Tillim’s work is currently being exhibited at Document 12, Global Cities at Tate Modern, and Africa Remix (Johannesburg Art Gallery).

Nontsikelelo Veleko

Nontsikelelo Veleko brings a different focus to the AiM photography show. By photographing street fashion, and the concepts of beauty and its individuality, Veleko portrays the careful construction of identity and self-presentation. Her work began with the capturing of Johannesburg urban fashion, noticing the range of eccentric personalities fulfilling their notion of beauty. Through these portraits, Veleko explores perception and judgement, and reflects on the nature of a portrait, to present an individual to the world. Though she has only been on the photographic scene since 2000, Veleko has been recognised both locally and internationally. Her work has been shown at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Flowers East Gallery, London and at the International Centre of Photography, New York, as well as the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.

Alan Yentob

Alan Yentob is the Creative Director for the BBC. He is the focal point for talent management across the whole of the BBC. He joined the BBC in 1968, becoming a producer in 1970. He specialized in arts features, edited Arena (1978–85), and became head of BBC-TV music and arts in 1985. In 1996 he was appointed director of programmes for BBC television and in 2004 took the role of BBC's creative director. Alan also presented and wrote the landmark documentary on Leonardo Da Vinci and became host of BBC One’s successful and acclaimed arts programme, Imagine.