Molly Crabapple
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun, with Marwan Hisham, which was a 2018 National Book Award semifinalist. Her reportage has been published in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. She is the current artist in residence at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and has been the recipient of a Yale Poynter Fellowship, a Front Page Award, and shortlisted for a Frontline Print Journalism Award. She is often asked to discuss her work chronicling the conflicts of the 21st century, and has spoken at venues including The Guggenheim, Harvard, Yale, The Brooklyn Museum, The London School of Economics, the American University in Beirut, The National College of the Arts in Lahore, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, for audiences throughout Europe, and in Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, India, and Palestine. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the United States Library of Congress, and the New York Historical Society.
Marwan Hisham
Marwan Hisham started his career as a journalist by taking pictures of the Syrian War and civilian life under ISIS for artist Molly Crabapple to draw from, and captioning them for a series of illustrative articles that first appeared in September, 2014, in Vanity Fair. Between 2014 and 2016, he travelled to war-ravaged cities like Mosul and Singar in Iraq, and Aleppo and Al-Bab in Syria.
His words have been published by a number of publications, including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Foreign Policy, The Intercept, and others. Brothers of the Gun, his book, co-authored with Molly Crabapple, is a memoir of his wartime experience that was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Awards. It was also featured as one of the New York Times’ notable books in 2018.
Marwan was born and lived most of his life in the city of Raqqa, Syria. He graduated from the Department of English Literature, Aleppo University in 2012. In 2016, in the wake of the civil war, he moved to Turkey, where he currently resides.
Cora Fisher
Cora Fisher is a curator and arts writer based in New York City. She is currently the Curator of Visual Art Programming at the Brooklyn Public Library for the Arts and Culture division, BPL Presents. Previously, she was the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) from 2013–2017, where she produced over twenty solo and group exhibitions, including Dispatches, an exhibition generating artistic responses to the news by 28 contemporary artists, photojournalists, and new media practitioners. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
Paul Jakov Smith
Paul Jakov Smith is Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures and the John R. Coleman Professor of Social Sciences at Haverford College. He is the author and editor of books and articles on Chinese social and institutional history during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and beyond, and is currently at work on Song China’s Hundred Years War, a study of the intersection of war and politics in the 11th and 12th centuries.
Banner: Aleppo Skyline, 2017, pen and ink on paper, 18 ¾ x 31 ¼ inches. © Molly Crabapple. Image courtesy the artist.