Laila Farah

Dr. Farah attended Lebanese American University and Eastern Michigan University while working toward her BA in Theatre and Communication Arts and her MA in Performance Studies and Communication. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Southern Illinois University. She is currently an Associate Professor in Women's and Gender Studies at DePaul University and engaged in creating future performance pieces to perform in Chicago, nationally and internationally. She is currently touring with her latest production of “Weaving the Maps," based on refugee women's narratives from Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. She has performed two previous one woman shows nationally and internationally, entitled, “Shaping the World With Our Hands" and “Living in the Hyphen-Nation." Her research interests include research with and the performance of “Third World" women and women of color, Arab American identities, “alien-nation," and ethnographic and auto-ethnographic performance. She is dedicated to her activism toward social justice, with an emphasis on gender justice and anti-racist and anti-imperialist and anti-settler-colonial oppressions.