Ahlam Muhtaseb

Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb is a professor of media studies at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) and a senior data justice fellow with Princeton's Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She has an M.A. in Journalism and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the recipient of the 2024 Women Support Organization’s Distinguished Woman of the Year award and the 2024 Activism and Social Justice Scholarly Influence Award by the National Communication Association’s (NCA’s) Activism and Social Justice Division. She is also the recipient of the 2020 CSUSB Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creative Activities Award and the 2019-20 Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Faculty Mentor Awardees. In 2019, she won the Rebuilding Alliance “Story Teller” Award. Her research interests include digital communication, digital resistance & decolonization, social justice, and diasporic communities. She is working currently on a study of Palestinian digital resistance and decolonizing digital spaces. She co-produced and co-directed the documentary 1948: Creation & Catastrophe that had been screened at over 20 film festivals and at universities and community organizations throughout the world. The film won the Jerusalem International Film Festival’s 2019 Special Jury Award in the Feature Documentary category. She was the producer and lead researcher of the documentary 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime which centered the three young Muslims murdered in Chapel Hill in 2015 in its discussion of the state of hate, Islamophobia and racism in the United States. The film had its global premier at the Doc NYC Film Festival in November of 2023 and won the Subject Matter Grant for Audience Outreach and Impact Efforts, in addition to the 2024 Swedish Academy Award for Best Documentary Film and the Dubai International Cine Carnival 2024 Award. She is the co-founder and faculty director of the Gaza xReal project: The Phoenix of Gaza.