Incoming Cultural Ambassadors
Taimaa Salama is an artist and arts educator whose relief paintings combine painting, sculpture, and photography in ways that allow blind and low vision children to engage with visual art.
Ms. Salama’s work has been profiled multiple times by Xinhua, Middle East Monitor, Global Times, APA, Amos Trust, Jinha, and elsewhere. Her pieces have been been awarded by the United Nations and exhibited by the National Association of Women Artists in partnership with UNESCO, Mediterranean Frequencies in Italy), the Butterfly Effect Festival (UK), the NUFF Film Festival (Norway), and elsewhere. She has presented at TEDx.
Past Cultural Ambassadors
Dieu-Nalio Chery’s photo essays have been published in The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post, and The Associated Press. He received the 2019 Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club for photographic reporting that required “exceptional courage and enterprise.” He was also a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography. Dieu-Nalio grew up in Haiti and began working in his uncle’s photo studio in Port-au-Prince in his twenties. From 2010 to 2021, Dieu-Nalio worked for The Associated Press, documenting the profound beauty and searing pain in his homeland. Many of his images have become iconic records of Haiti in the 21st century.
Elsa Nilaj is the creator of the web-series Girl in a Box. As a filmmaker and a poet, her work revolves around womanhood and authenticity. She is also the founder of CreateCreatives, dedicated to supporting students working in creative fields. At an early age, she found early influences in Disney Pixar VHS tapes and late-night reruns of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Drawing from her background in poetry, she infuses perspective, experimentation, and meaning into her editing and color work, engaging audiences with her unique approach.
Pwaangulongii Dauod’s essays have appear in Granta, LitHub, Johannesburg Review of Books, and elsewhere. He studied with celebrated authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Binyavanga Wainaina and holds an MFA from University of Virginia. He is the recipient of two MacDowell Fellowships, an O’Brien Fellowship at the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, and a Gerald Kraak Award. He was a finalist for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Manuscript Prize. He is full-time creative writing faculty at Wayne State and is represented by the Wylie Agency.
Amira Hanafi is a poet and artist who creates systems, games, and interactive digital works to bring different voices and characters into conversation with each other. Her works are widely accessible online and have been shown in offline exhibitions around the world. She is the author of the books Forgery and Minced English, a number of limited-edition artist’s books, and a growing number of works of electronic literature.