Jessica Jabr & Zeina Abi Assy
Zeina Abi Assy is a curator, writer, designer, and educator. She is the Partnerships & Dialogue Lead at Mozilla Foundation. Previously, she was the Director of Interactive Programs at Tribeca Film Institute where she focused on the convergence of emerging media, storytelling, technology and social justice. With experience in the Middle East and North America, her work moves between cultural criticism and poetry to investigate the complexity of culture, technology and politics and their effects on our lived experiences. Her work has appeared in the printed anthology “Arab Women Voice New Realities.” She teaches Design Writing at Pratt Institute, and consults IDFA's new media DocLab Forum.
Jessica Jabr is a Lebanese born-New York based business professional and design technologist.She’s currently a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, teaching Transformation Design Studio under the Graduate Communications Design program and a lecturer at the Design&Technology BFA program at Parsons School of Design, The New School, where she gives the Objects Lab which involves interaction design and physical computing. She has worked in the global startup/tech/media ecosystem while based in the Middle East and helped hundreds of startups and entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses through building and running support programs. Previously, she was in charge of the Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship Center at AUB, and handled programs, activations, entrepreneur & investors engagement at Arabnet (one of the biggest startup/tech ecosystems in the MENA region). The core of her work is based on human-computer interaction. She designs user experiences intuitively and builds technology with human wellbeing at the forefront.