Trained as a filmmaker and anthropologist, Maryam Kashani is an assistant professor in gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on theories and theologies of liberation, geography, race, Islam, visual culture, and social movements. Her book project Medina by the Bay: the Ethics of Knowledge and Survival in the Bay Area (under contract with Duke University Press) is based on ethnographic research and filmmaking conducted amongst Muslim communities in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Her films and video installations have been shown at film festivals, universities, and museums internationally and include things lovely and dangerous still (2003), Best in the West (2006), las callecitas y la cañada (2009), and Signs of Remarkable History(2016). As a RITM fellow, she is working with composer/musician Wadada Leo Smith on the Ten Freedom Summers Film Project, which examines the ongoing relationships between the struggles for Black freedom, music, and religion. Kashani is also a part of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition.