Interview
Culture, Institutions, and Collective Practice.
Can you share more about your educational background, early career, and some significant milestones in your professional and personal journey?
I studied business at the American University of Beirut, though what I really wanted was to make films. That gap between what I wanted and what I was doing turned out to be generative in ways I could not have predicted. A teacher there told me I was a strong writer, and that single observation planted something. I started writing for a magazine, and that experience of language as a way of making meaning, of a publication as a gathering place, changed the course of everything.
It led me to found The Outpost, which became a significant chapter: a magazine that tried to think seriously about the Arab world, culture, and ideas at a moment when that felt urgent and necessary. But perhaps the more important milestone was stopping it. Closing something you built is its own kind of education. The questions that came out of that, about what a publication actually does, about how language moves between people, about what it means to create conditions for collective thinking, became the research that eventually led to Poet Electric, the artistic framework I have been developing since. In some ways, Poet Electric is what The Outpost was always reaching toward, just in a different form.
The through line, looking back, is less about institutions or titles and more about a persistent question: how does language generate meaning in common? That question has taken me from journalism to institutional leadership to poetic practice, and I suspect it will keep pulling me forward.
Can you take us through the first steps that come to mind when a director takes over the leadership of an institution?
The textbook answer to this question, assess the institution, listen to the team, build a hundred-day plan, belongs to a different context. I had a one-day handover. Three months later, the war came. So the first steps, for me, were less about strategy and more about staying. Staying present, staying functional, keeping the institution alive as a breathing thing when everything around it was contracting. In conditions like Beirut's, a cultural institution is not a luxury you tend to carefully. It is an argument you have to keep making, daily, that culture is not what happens after the crisis but how a society stays legible to itself, and keeps imagining a future, precisely when both feel impossible. What pulled me through the hardest moments was holding onto a clear vision, for what BAC could be, for what I believed cultural institutions are for, for the future I was working toward even when the present made it feel unreachable. The vision was not a plan. It was more like a compass. In the absence of stable conditions, it became the thing I navigated by.
I think a director in a stable European city inherits an institution the way you inherit a house in good repair: you can think about renovations, about what you would change, about the long view. In Beirut, you inherit something more like a fire that needs tending. The first question is not "what is my vision" but "what must not go out." And that is not a lesser form of leadership. I would argue it sharpens you in ways that comfort does not. You learn very quickly what the institution actually is, beneath its programs and budgets and reputation. You learn what it means to people. You learn that a cultural center, at its core, is a place where a community rehearses who it wants to be, and that function becomes more critical, not less, when the world outside is in collapse.
That is the condition I stepped into. The crisis tested everything. The vision is what remained.
In parallel, you have worked on Kiteverse. What exactly is Kiteverse, and can you discuss some of the projects you've worked on and the kind of projects you'd like to pursue?
Kiteverse was an ambitious attempt to build a framework for collective creative practice, one that could hold together language, community, and artistic production under a single roof. It did not survive its own ambition, and I say that without bitterness. Some projects need to fail in order to clarify what they were actually reaching for.
What Kiteverse gave me was a map of the wrong roads, which, if you are honest about it, is one of the most valuable things a project can leave behind. Every place it broke down pointed toward something I had not yet understood about how creative ecosystems actually function, about the relationship between language and collective meaning-making, about what it takes to build something that sustains rather than consumes itself.
Poet Electric is where that learning landed. In many ways, Kiteverse was the seed, the attempt that did not take root in the form it imagined, but whose failure fed everything that came after. I do not look back at it with regret. I look back at it the way you look at early drafts: grateful for what they taught you, clear that you would not return to them. The projects I want to pursue now live fully within the Poet Electric framework, and they are built precisely on the understanding that Kiteverse helped me reach the hard way.
The art and cultural sector in Lebanon once generated nearly $2 billion annually but no longer does. What do you think is needed at the masterplanning level to recreate a fertile ecosystem for the sector?
The $2 billion figure is real, but I would be cautious about making it the goal. If reconstruction means recreating the conditions that produced that number, a cultural economy built on a financial system that has since collapsed, on a stability that was always more fragile than it looked, then we are masterplanning toward a mirage.
What Lebanon actually needs, at the level of genuine masterplanning, is a rethinking of the relationship between culture and infrastructure. Not culture as an afterthought once the "real" rebuilding is done, but culture as part of the rebuilding logic itself: load-bearing, not ornamental. The cities and societies that have recovered from profound rupture did so in part because they invested in the institutions that helped communities process what had happened to them and imagine what came next. That is not a soft argument. That is a structural one.
Concretely, this means several hard things. It means public funding mechanisms that do not require a stable banking sector to function, which is not a given here, and which no one in power seems willing to design. It means treating cultural institutions as infrastructure in the legal and fiscal sense: with the protections, tax frameworks, and long-term investment logic that apply to roads and schools. It means creative education pathways and residency frameworks that keep talent in the country rather than watching it leave on every available flight. It means accountability from the state, not as patron, but as guarantor of the conditions in which culture can exist.
And it means trusting practitioners to lead. The artists, directors, writers, curators who have kept working through collapse, through war, through the compounded humiliations of this past decade, they are not waiting to be included in someone else's vision. They are the masterplan. The question is whether the institutions and decision-makers around them will finally organize themselves in service of that fact, rather than the other way around.
The ecosystem will not return through a document. It will return through the accumulation of serious bets on people and institutions already doing the work. The masterplan's job is to stop making that work harder than it needs to be.
As a resident of Beirut, we are curious to hear your perspective on the current situation in the city and your insights on its future outlook.
Beirut is a city that has been failed systematically and repeatedly, and by people who knew exactly what they were doing. The collapse was not an accident. The explosion was not an accident. The wars, the paralysis, the emigration of an entire generation, was the accumulated result of a political class that treated the country as a resource to be extracted rather than a place to be governed. That has to be said plainly before anything else, because too much of the conversation about Beirut's future skips past the accountability question and goes straight to resilience narratives that end up flattering the wrong people.
And yet. I live here. I choose to work here. And I will not hide behind careful optimism or measured language. The Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous said it best: we are doomed by hope. That is exactly where I stand. Not hope as consolation, not hope as naivety, but hope as the only serious response to what this city has survived and what it still carries. Doom and hope together, inseparable, which is perhaps the most honest description of Beirut right now.
What I see here is a population that has absorbed an almost incomprehensible sequence of shocks and is still, stubbornly, here. Still opening things, still making things, still arguing about what the city should be. The question is whether the political restructuring this country desperately needs will happen at a speed that matches the patience of the people still here. I do not know the answer. But I am not leaving the question.