Short bio
Imad Gebrayel is a Lebanese designer, educator, and researcher based in Berlin. He specialized in identity representation and bilingual visual communication and produced visual and theoretical works around self-Orientalism in Arab* design, counter-mapping, and archiving. After years of experience as a creative director between Abu Dhabi and Beirut, Imad moved to the Netherlands, where he received a Master’s degree in Design, then to Berlin where he co-founded various projects centering Arab-migrant experiences. He is currently teaching at several academic institutions and undertaking ethnographic research on the negotiations of Arab-Arab identifications in Sonnenallee-Berlin, part of his PhD project at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Beate Binder (HU) and Prof. Dr. Iman Attia (ASH).
Related publications
The 'Sonnenallee Podcast' project (awarded the Multimodal Projects Fund, WiSe21-22) discusses urban negotiations of space and time in open-ended conversation formats with guest speakers: what affects condition the notion of public space in Sonnenallee? How is public space understood in light of the complex system of identifications in and around the street? And how can such stories creatively challenge the reductivist attitudes facing migrant groups in the public space?