Qatar Week 2025 Team

Qatar Week Team

Qatar team

• Asmaa Benkermi, Marketing Communications Coordinator
• Darrell Pinontoan, Website Content Manager
• Haya Daher, Senior Graphic Designer
• Isabel Latayan, Administrative and Events Coordinator
• Kathryn London-Penny, Executive Director Of Strategic Communication
• Lejla Nikšić, Director Of Strategic Engagement
• Maya Roeder, Events Manager
• Mike Gallagher, Social Media Manager
• Moza Al-Suwaidi, Senior Graphic Designer
• Ola Ali Hassan, Administrative Business Coordinator
• Sara Shaaban, Creative Director

Richmond team

• Carla Averill, Special Events Coordinator
• Jenna Carr, VCUarts Social Media Manager/Digital Storyteller
• Kelly Kerr, Interim Executive Director of Communications & Director of Constituent Engagement
• Ryan Sprowl, Art Director

Contributors

The exhibition “Digital Drift” is organized by The Gallery and Digital Design + Fabrication at VCUarts Qatar, in partnership with The Anderson and VCUarts Richmond.

Qatar team

• Chase Westfall, Head of Gallery
• Hala Alzawaydeh, Digital Design + Fabrication Coordinator
• Meriem Aiouna, Associate Curator of Special Projects
• Shankar Padmanabhan, Head of Digital Design + Fabrication

Richmond team

• Chris Mahonski, Digital Fabrication Technician, Sculpture + Extended Media
• Sarah Irvin, Administrative Coordinator, The Anderson

Presenters

Cherif Amor, Ph.D., EDRA, IDEC, ICFAD & IIDA
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs & Professor, VCUarts
Chair— ID Network Environmental Design Research Association

Cherif currently holds the position of Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar, where he began his tenure in early 2013 as the Chair of the Department of Interior Design. Prior to this, he served as the Director of the Interior and Environmental Design graduate program and Chair of the Department of Design at Texas Tech University. Cherif also previously served as the Director of Education for the International Interior Design Association (IIDA), Texas/Oklahoma Chapter. His research interests include neuro-imaging and the built environment, evidence-based design, and collaborative pedagogies, all developed through academic and industry-funded projects. Cherif is a consultant and site visitor for the Council for Interior Design Accreditation and the Chair of the Environmental Design Research Association Interior Design Network. Additionally, he serves as an academic consultant for institutions in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain. Cherif has received numerous teaching, research, and service awards from esteemed institutions and conferences, notably the QF Annual Research Conference, the International Academy for Design and Health, and the Environmental Design Research Association.

Chris Mahonski
Digital Fabrication Technician, VCUarts

Chris Mahonski’s work is informed by geology and history of human interaction with the landscapes of Appalachia. Born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, his early fascination with fossil collecting evolved into a sculptural practice that blends found and fabricated objects into intricate arrangements. His work has been exhibited nationally, and he has received numerous honors including the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship, Triangle Arts Residency, 7-Below Residency, and Mountain Lake Biological Research Station Residency. Chris holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University. He currently serves as an instructor and digital fabrication technician at VCU, where he continues to investigate the messy spectrum of material objects.

Fatma Abdel Aziz
VCUarts Qatar Alumna 2008 (Graphic Design)

Fatma graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design from VCUarts Qatar in 2008 and worked on key programs like Qatar Foundation’s Stars of Science. She developed a passion for culture and heritage, earning an MA in Archaeology from University College London, Qatar in 2015. Fatma has served as a cultural consultant for the National Museum of Qatar and participated in significant archaeological excavations in the region. Her work focuses on creating collaborative spaces that respect community needs through GCC cultural projects.

Hala Auji
Associate Professor of Art History and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art at VCUarts Richmond

Hala Auji’s research centers on 19th-century Arab visual and print culture, particularly the art of the book, print culture, and portraiture, while also engaging issues of modern and contemporary art in Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) and trans-Asian contexts. At VCU, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Islamic art, SWANA visual culture, the history and theory of museums and collections, and the art of the book, with an emphasis on postcolonial, decolonial, and transregional approaches that challenge conventional geographic and disciplinary boundaries. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016), and co-editor of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment: Mass Culture and Modernity in the Middle East (Bloomsbury, 2023; 2025) and Islamic Art History and the Global Turn: Theory, Method, Practice (Yale, 2026, with Radha Dalal). Her scholarship has appeared in numerous journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues. Auji holds a PhD in Art History from Binghamton University, an MA in Criticism and Theory from Art Center College of Design, and a BFA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut.

Kate Sicchio, Ph.D.
Graduate Director, Kinetic Imaging, VCUarts
Associate Professor of Dance and Media Technologies

Kate Sicchio is a choreographer and media artist exploring how technology transforms movement, performance, and collaboration. Her work spans wearable tech, live coding, and real-time systems, creating new intersections between code and choreography. Her work has been presented across the US, UK, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, and she has spoken at events such as Eyeo, Resonate, and at the EU Parliament. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Dance Magazine, Dazed Digital, and El Diario. She is currently a 2025 Processing Foundation Fellow and serves as Associate Professor of Dance and Media Technology at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she continues to explore innovative approaches to human-machine collaboration in performance.

Kristin Carleton
Assistant Professor & Graduate Program Director of Interior Design, VCUarts

Kristin Carleton is an Assistant Professor and the Graduate Program Director of Interior Design at VCUarts. She holds a Master of Architecture from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design from James Madison University. She is a certified Interior Designer and Licensed Architect, and she maintains a solo design consulting practice, Human Level Design LLC.

Kristin has a wide range of project type experience, and she specializes in adaptive reuse of historic structures, construction administration, and lighting design.

Her teaching emphasizes that interior design work only gets stronger the more perspectives participate in developing it, and that the goal of every project should be to make life better for the people who use the spaces we create.

Levi Hammett
Professor & Director of Kinetic Imaging, VCUarts Qatar

Levi Hammett is a designer and associate professor exploring the synthesis of computational processes and traditional crafts with an emphasis on the development of culturally constructive graphic objects. His work includes a series of hand-made Islamic carpets that explore the urban culture of the Arabian Peninsula, a kinetic installation using 40 printers suspended from the ceiling outputting typography and imagery scraped from the web, and a series of digital displays imagining alternative histories of Arabic typography.

He has taught courses and workshops at Oregon State University, Rhode Island School of Design, CommDE at Chulalongkorn University, LASALLE College of the Arts, and the School for Poetic Computation at NYU. His creative work has been published, acquired, and exhibited throughout the world.

In 2019 Levi co-founded xLab, a non-hierarchical research and development studio working to produce electronic art, curricula, and computational tools to extend creative practice.

Luiza Dale
Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, VCUarts

Luiza Dale is an assistant professor of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work explores visual representation that pushes against norms of clarity and the combination of theater and graphic design. Luiza designs independently and as part of the studio The Aliens.

For a while Luiza has used the term Bad Design to define a way of working that questions industry standards which uphold the status quo. Over the past year she has compiled a design history of footnotes to understand how type hierarchy is connected to social structures that often marginalize. Luiza’s work points to how much of our lives follows scripts set for us. She is interested in theater, and its pairing with design and teaching, as a way for us to break convention and make us feel alive.

Luiza has taught at the Yale School of Art, Parsons School of Design, and Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts. She has spoken at Cooper Union’s Typographics, Typography Theory Practice, and Easy Lessoning. Luiza ran the publishing practice Quickbooks from 2019 to 2024 and was graphic designer in residence at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art from 2024 to 2025. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art.

Michael Royce
Adjunct Professor, Art Foundation, Communication Arts, VCUarts

Michael Royce (b. 1988, Arlington, VA) is an artist based in Richmond, Virginia. He earned his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he currently serves as Assistant Professor in the Art Foundations Program.

Royce has presented recent solo exhibitions at Headstone Gallery, Iridian Gallery, and ADA Gallery. His work has been included in exhibitions at venues including Steven Zevitas Gallery, Shin Haus, Sam and Adele Golden Gallery, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Golden Foundation, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and the Yale at Norfolk School of Music and Art.

He has received grants and fellowships from the Rauschenberg Foundation, The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Heinz Endowments, and the David Wurtzel Memorial Fellowship at VCU. His work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and New American Painting.

Michael Walker
VCUarts Alumnus 2016 (Graphic Design)

Michael Walker is a Senior Product Designer at Amazon in New York City. He is the primary designer for the app that powers Amazon.com. Previously, he has designed for a startup that aimed to build the world’s first underground park, a Fortune 500 consulting firm, an advertising agency, an art museum, and a non-profit studio. His work centers on the reciprocal nature of human-computer interaction, and he is particularly interested in how technology shapes our lives in unexpected ways. In addition to design, he leads a non-profit initiative that creates websites for activists and organizations around the world. 

Michael Walker graduated in the spring of 2016 with a BFA in Graphic Design from the VCU School of the Arts. He studied abroad in Doha during the fall semester of 2014.

Michelle Yee
Assistant Professor of Art History, VCUarts

Michelle Yee’s research focuses on contemporary Asian American and Asian Diasporic art. Her research interests include race and representation, transnational connections and collisions, and cosmopolitanisms. Her writing can be found in journals such as Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Third Text, Panorama, and Art Etc. as well as several exhibition catalogues. She received an MA and PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an MA in Art History from the University of Connecticut, and a BA in Art History and English Literature from Georgetown University.

Monica Merlin
Assistant Professor of Art History, VCUarts Qatar

With a specialization in Chinese studies and Asian art, Monica Merlin holds a doctorate in art history from Oxford University. Her research investigates the work and practice of contemporary women artists in China and Global Asia with a focus on gender, feminism, intersectionality, visual activism and mobility. Merlin’s publications are included in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and she has contributed to encyclopedic and curatorial projects. She is the co-PI of the Global Asia: Mobilities and Arts Lab (GA:MA Lab), a research initiative funded since 2024 by the Institute for Creative Research (ICR) at VCUarts Qatar. 

Noha Olivia Fahmy
VCUarts Qatar Alumna 2015 (Interior Design)

A proud graduate of VCUQatar, where she earned her BFA in Interior Design in 2015. During her studies, she pursued international internships across diverse design specialties, gaining cross-cultural experience that helped shape her career. Today, with over a decade of experience, she leads Architecture and Visual Merchandising for LVMH’s beauty brands in the Middle East and Indian Subcontinent. Guided by her passion for storytelling and customer experience, Noha bridges architecture, design, and luxury retail by translating global brand strategies into local market realities. Her work reflects how design can transcend boundaries, connecting people, places, and ideas.

Nathan Ross Davis
Associate Professor, Art Foundation, VCUarts Qatar

Nathan Ross Davis is an Associate Professor at VCUarts Qatar, where his research explores publishing as an artistic practice and form of cultural inquiry. He co-founded Water With Water, an experimental platform with Sarah Elawad that produces artist books zines and apparel. The project emphasizes collaboration and graphic experimentation, positioning independent publishing as a space for exchange and cultural dialogue. 

Trained in sculpture and design (MFA, California College of the Arts), Davis approaches publishing as a site where research, pedagogy, and practice intersect. At VCUarts Qatar, Nathan leads Surface Research, a studio framework that introduces students to experimental making, cultural inquiry, and critical design practice, while shaping the foundation curriculum more broadly.

Radha Dalal 
Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture and Director of Art History, VCUarts Qatar

Radha Dalal’s research examines visual cultures of mobility and urbanism, with particular emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and its socio-political interactions with European and Asian polities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is currently working on a monograph titled The Khilafat Movement and Print Media in British India and Ottoman Turkey, 1919–1924. Dalal’s research has received support from VCUarts Qatar, the MacArthur Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Qatar National Research Fund. She is co-editor of The Seas and the Mobility of Islamic Art (Yale, 2021) and The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art and Culture (Yale, 2023). At VCUarts Qatar, she teaches global and Islamic art surveys, thematic courses on Ancient, Islamic, Asian, and European art, and senior seminars that draw on her research interests in collective memory, mobility, and visual culture. Dalal currently serves on the College Art Association’s Board of Directors and as Vice-President of the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies. She holds an MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Art History & Archaeology and a BS in Neurobiology and Physiology from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Roberto Ventura
Chair of Interior Design & Associate Professor, VCUarts

Roberto Ventura is Associate Professor and Chair of Interior Design in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.

His current research focuses on issues surrounding diversity, inclusion, and equity in interior design. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Miami University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Math-Physics from Albion College, and maintains a solo practice, roberto ventura design studio.

Shankar Padmanabhan
Head of Digital Design + Fabrication and Assistant Professor, VCUarts Qatar

Shankar Padmanabhan is a designer, educator, and musician from Vancouver, Canada. He has taught at the University of Montana, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, the Old Town School of Folk Music (Chicago), and is currently an Assistant Professor and Head of Digital Design + Fabrication at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar.

His work was most recently featured in the London Design Biennale 2025, and has also exhibited in Canada, USA, and Qatar.

Shankar’s practice explores and is supported by theoretical underpinnings found in Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Material Engagement Theory (MET). Through the development of speculative fiction and diegetic artifacts, his practice aims to navigate sociocultural, technological, and biological landscapes in order to critically reflect and interrogate the role of design in our everyday lives. Examining the human-object relationship, Shankar’s practice employs a discursive approach to develop ‘what if’ scenarios and weave narratives that are considerate of human relations, interactions, aspirations, and dreams.

Simone Carena
Associate Professor, Interior Design, VCUarts Qatar

Born in Turin, Simone Carena studied in Italy, England, Canada, USA and Jamaica. After a double Master in Architecture from the Politecnico di Torino and SCI_Arc, he opened a studio that mixed architecture and media. The echo of one of these projects, a music video for the deaf, let to his invitation to teach Digital Media Design in Seoul’s IDAS Hongik University in 2001.

In 2006, he founded the award-winning studio MOTOElastico.com with Marco Bruno. The office celebrates a dynamic and optimistic trust in constructive misunderstanding between cultures, calling it “DUB Architecture”.

In 2010 the Dub Version of a Korean traditional house, featured on the Architectural Review and the New York Times, won the Asia Interior Design Institute Association’ Gold Award. In 2017 he was dubbed “Knight of the Italian Star” by the Italian President for his contribution on cultural relations between Korea and Italy.

In 2022 he moved with his Italo-Korean family to Doha to join VCUarts’ IDES, carrying a luggage full of Bob Marley, Korean and Italian treats to share with the students.

The whole family is very happy about the new life chapter in Qatar.

Tim Hamnett
Assistant Professor, Interior Design, VCUarts

Tim Hamnett is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. His architectural pursuits centered on memorials, monuments, public spaces, museums, multi-family and affordable housing. His academic research considers cartography and maritime tradition and craft within the Chesapeake Bay region. He is interested in the balance and celebration achieved through creativity, boldness and practicality. He studied at the University of Florida and holds a Master’s of Architecture from the University of Washington.