The following exercises are structured to sequentially build on each other. We encourage you to consider how their learning objectives develop as you engage with these activities or adapt them to your teaching.

Walid Raad is an artist born in Lebanon in 1967 and grew up in East Beirut. Compelled to leave during the Lebanese Civil War, he emigrated to the US, where he finished high school. Raad completed his undergraduate work at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State, where he took classes in photography and Middle Eastern studies. He subsequently received a PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, completing his dissertation on the capture of Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s. During the course of his PhD, he also took a break from his studies to live in Lebanon in the early 1990s, where he participated in Beirut's lively artistic scene and made long-lasting contacts with artists and writers including Akram Zaatari and Jalal Toufic.

His work engages film, photography, installation, performance, and forms of fictional collectivities to explore how histories are archived, remembered, and re-told. Raad has exhibited work widely across the world, and is currently a Professor of Art at The Cooper Union in New York.