DR. NAAZNEEN DIWAN
Naazneen Diwan is an educator, writer, community organizer and curriculum designer. She has been an organizer with South Asians for Justice, LA, INCITE! LA, women and gender non-conforming folks against violence, as well as an advocate/ally for the Palestinian liberation struggle and struggles for justice and dignity for immigrants. She has supported the emotional and spiritual wellness of Black Lives Matter, LA and Dignity and Power Now! organizers through facilitating meditation and mindfulness circles across LA, from LAPD headquarters to Wellness Clinics for families impacted by violence in LA jails. With a PhD in Gender Studies from UCLA, she has taught courses in Arabic, Interracial Solidarity, Gender and Knowledge, Disability Studies and Gender and Race in the U.S. at Ohio State University, UCLA and CSULA for over 12 years. She's a transnational Activist-Scholar who builds dynamic, vibrant community wherever she goes: from working as a translator at an underground human rights publication in Damascus, Syria to co-founding a transnational feminist, 10-day convening in Berlin, Germany. She absolutely loves working with youth and co-creating decolonial educational spaces; she's led workshops on Islamophobia at Bay Area Solidarity Summer, a social justice retreat for South Asian Youth, co-facilitated a workshop on storytelling and art activism at SoCal Solidarity for LGBTQ South Asian youth, and organized Decompression Spaces to support the holistic wellness of participants. In recent years, she has joined the Steering Committee of Vigilant Love, a coalition of Japanese and Muslim Americans, to combat Islamophobic policies, reclaim public space through performance, and nurture community safety and trust building with healing justice practices. She worked in Gujarat, India for two years facilitating creative arts and healing workshops with Muslim women activists and survivors and studying the impact of the 2002 genocide against Muslims. Upon her return to the U.S. she conjured up iterations of these arts and empowerment workshops across the U.S., called KalaaShakti and Maktoub Collective. In her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, she became Lead Instructor for Baldwin House Urban Writing Residency hosted by Twelve Literary Arts as well as an Artist-in-Residence, founding and establishing Maktoub Collective with generous support by the Cleveland Foundation and Neighborhood Connections. You can read her poetry and prose in The Yale Review, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, Entropy Mag, Sky Island Journal, Cathexis Press, Serendipity Magazine, fly paper magazine, Kohl, Project As[I]Am, SAMAR, MOONROOT and others.
