Dr. Mubbashir Rizvi is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at American University. He holds a Ph.D. in Social-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Texas-Austin and a BA from Brooklyn College (CUNY). His research and teaching interests span social movements, political ecology, racial capitalism, environmental justice, and indigenous and peasant land rights across South Asia and its diasporas. He is broadly interested in how marginalized communities strive to build a good life in the midst of economic uncertainty and state repression. 

His book, The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights in Pakistan (Stanford University Press, 2019), offers a history and ethnography of the Anjuman-e-Muzareen-e-Punjab (AMP), a land rights movement that successfully challenged the Pakistani military’s efforts to privatize state-owned lands. Beyond this monograph, his scholarly publications analyze how infrastructure projects shape political subjectivity in Punjab, how counter-terrorism policies are deployed to suppress agrarian demands, and the complex dynamics that arise when NGOs and civil society intervene in grassroots struggles. 

Dr. Rizvi's current fieldwork turns toward informal urbanism in Karachi’s food markets, examining how these spaces structure relations of coexistence in the aftermath of urban violence. Closer to home, he is also directing a Washington, D.C.-based project that investigates the overlooked history and memory of the Potomac River waterfront through the lens of racial capitalism. 

Kat Thompson is a lens-based artist and educator based in Virginia. She holds an MFA in Photography & Film from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Photography from George Mason University. Her interdisciplinary practice spans photography, video, textiles, sculptural collage, and installation. Through layering and material juxtaposition, she examines how images and objects function as vessels for memory, history, and identity, with a particular focus on the African Diaspora. Her work considers the construction of Black selfhood, exploring how cultural memory, ancestral inheritance, and lived experience converge across personal and collective narratives. 

Thompson is a 2023–2025 Hamiltonian Artists Fellow. She has presented solo exhibitions at 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA), Hamiltonian Artists (Washington, D.C.), and George Mason University. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Mid-Atlantic and southern United States, including Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA), Visible Records (Charlottesville, VA), Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Reston, VA), and Green Space Miami. Additionally, she has participated in prestigious residencies at The Watermill Center, MASS MoCA, the Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), the Torpedo Factory Post-Graduate Residency, and the VisArts Gibbs Street Residency. 

Gail Rebhan is a Washington, D.C.-based photographer and Professor Emerita of Photography at Northern Virginia Community College. She holds an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and an undergraduate degree from Antioch College. Integral to her various bodies of work is an interest in time and change. Her works, which often configure photographs and text in series, examine gender, aging, race, ethnicity, and the built environment. As the child of immigrants, Rebhan documents the experience of several individual Jews under Hitler’s reign in Europe and their immigration stories. 

Her artistic projects explore both personal and collective histories across generations. Her Art on the ART bus project, commissioned by Arlington County, Virginia, tells immigration and assimilation stories crossing generations and ethnic groups, while her site-specific photo-collages examine the cultural history of particular locations in Washington, D.C., and surrounding communities. In her self-portrait series, Living, Rebhan examines the taboo subject of female aging, while her recent work, What Questions Do We Ask?, uses shifting U.S. Census questions to create a visual synopsis of U.S. history. 

Rebhan’s work has been featured in hundreds of exhibitions, including at the Lentos Kunstmuseum (Linz, Austria), Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany), and Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, Oregon). In conjunction with her first museum retrospective, Gail Rebhan, About Time, at the American University Museum-Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C., MACK Books published Gail Rebhan, About Time with running commentaries by Sally Stein. In 2025, this retrospective traveled to the California Museum of Photography in Riverside. Rebhan actively photographs and coordinates exhibitions with the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition.