Biljana coordinates our research group which stimulates academic study concerning heritage questions surrounding National Museums, World Heritage Sites and development through culture. Until 2015 Biljana was coordinating all activities relating to the Afghanistan Program for Culture and Development. Biljana is also a PhD student at Utrecht University. Her current research investigate the potential of culture in bringing social and political change in society on one side and the social and civil movements that emerge as reaction to oppressive cultural politics, on the other.

Sibongile works with CIE since 2009. She is coordinating the “Our World Heritage”; a global initiative promoted by a group of individuals involved over the years in the implementation of the World Heritage Convention with an aim of transforming the manner in which the Convention is implemented. Sibo is a lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at Sol Plaatje University in the Northern Cape of South Africa. She holds a PhD in environmental Education from Rhodes University. She is currently a Deputy Editor for the Southern African Journal of Environmental Education. Sibongile is also involved in two African Union projects which are; the development of a framework for the cultural and creative industries for Africa as well as a member of an Africa team conceptualising the Museum of Africa project which will be based in Algeria.

Alia Yunis has worked on projects on five continents, focusing her writing and filmmaking on memory and heritage. Her feature documentary, The Golden Harvest (2019), made its debut at Thessaloniki International Film Festival, won Best of the Fest at its US debut at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and has gone on to play in several other festivals. Alia spent many years in Los Angeles as a screenwriter and script analyst for companies such as Village Roadshow Pictures and Miramax. Alia is a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and the recipient of a comedy-writing award from Warner Bros.  Her novel, The Night Counter (Random House 2010), was critically-acclaimed by the Washington Post, the Boston Entertainment Weekly, and several other publications, and it is read in classes in several schools and universities.  Her fiction and non-fiction writings have appeared in numerous books, magazines and anthologies and been translated into six languages.

She is currently co-editing two anthologies looking at the connections between the Gulf and the rest of the Arab world, Africa and the Indian subcontinent through film and visual media. She is is one of the contributing writers on the Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Oxford Bibliographies (2021). In 2010, she co-founded the Zayed University Middle East Film Festival (ZUMEFF), now the longest running film festival in the Gulf. She is also one of the two co-founders at UAE National Film Library housed at Zayed University

Umayya is a writer and researcher specializing in cultural policy, identity and future planning. With a BA in Asian and African studies and MA in Media Studies, she has worked as a tv-journalist, lecturer, and as a researcher at the Finnish National Gallery. She was a member of the Arts council of Finland and chaired its first Multicultural Board. As an advisor and expert she worked for the Finnish Ministries of Education, Culture, and Finance. She actively works with the CIE with our events and heritage activities, as well as working on CIE publications.

Paschal recently graduated from NYUAD with a major in Civil Engineering and a minor in Interactive Media Arts and Technology. To follow his passion for computer programming, in 2017, he established a software development start-up in Tanzania. The start-up is specialized in developing mobile and web platforms, especially education-related platforms for companies and NGOs. Besides, he manages CIE servers and develops new platforms for CIE. Currently, he is developing interactive web and mobile apps for visualizing ship voyages in the Indian Ocean in the 17th century.