Global Education Week 2023: Express Your Humanity:

Haifa Subay is a graffiti and street artist whose depiction of humanitarian issues, motherhood and war, and the desire for peace gives a voice to the people of Yemen. She has led a number of powerful campaigns including “#SilentVoices”, which demonstrates the human cost of war, and “Women and War”, which portrays her own experience with pregnancy and motherhood, the effects of being a woman in wartime, and her desire for peace. Subay’s work, “War and Humans”, was featured in the Singapore Art Museum as a part of the Singapore Biennale 2019: Every Step In The Right Direction and was shortlisted for the 12th Benesse Prize. She also received a Seed Award from the Prince Claus Fund, which recognizes emerging artists whose work engages with social and political issues. Haifa is also part of the Artist Protection Fund program.

Abdelrahman ElGendy is a writer and former Egyptian political prisoner. Arrested from a protest in Cairo, he spent six years and three months behind bars between October 6, 2013, and January 13, 2020. Incarcerated at 17 and released at 24, he started and earned a mechanical engineering BSc from Ain Shams University in Egypt while in prison. His smuggled prison writings circulated online until picked up and published in 2018 by Mada Masr, an independent journalism platform in Egypt. Since his release, he has turned to writing and advocacy work. His vision as a dissident writer has been to utilize counter-narratives of the marginalized and oppressed as a form of resistance to state propaganda, with a focus on advocating for the release of Egyptian political prisoners. ElGendy currently pursues an MFA in Creative Writing, nonfiction track, at the University of Pittsburgh, working on a book project that explores the topic of political incarceration and the visceral experiences prisoners undergo in prison through his personal narratives about the world behind bars. He aims to stir a powerful enough conversation to impact the political situation in Egypt, and create a documentation that serves as a testimony and reference for this period in Egyptian history. ElGendy’s writing is featured on Mada Masr, Raseef 22, Daraj Media, AlManassa, Newlines Magazine and the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy; and was a Logan Nonfiction 2021 fellow as a dissident writer. He is also the head writer and editor of the Leading Change Network NGO .