Reimagining Histories

Event time: 
Wednesday, October 9, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:30pm
Location: 
35 Hillhouse Avenue (HLH35), Provost's House See map
35 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

A conversation on the agency of storytelling, journalistic integrity, and the preservation of narrative with Susan Youssef, filmmaker, and Onur Burcak Belli, journalist and World Fellow.
Susan Youssef is the writer/director of two dramatic features, a documentary, and seven shorts that have been official selections of film festivals such as Venice, Toronto International, and Sundance, as well as have been programmed in museums including Tate Modern, New Museum, and Museum of Modern Art - New York. She is a Fulbright Fellow, Princess Grace Award Winner, and 21st Century Fox Director Fellow. Prior to filmmaking, she was a schoolteacher and journalist in Beirut.
Onur Burçak Belli is a Syrian-Turkish journalist. For most of her career, Burçak has focused on conflicts in Turkey, where she has been based for the past five years, working for Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, covering conflicts and crises in Turkey and the broader region. With 13 years of experience writing for international media outlets, her reporting is often through a lense of comprehensive rights and freedoms, writing in feature, long-form, or non-fiction storytelling styles. In 2010, Burçak was based in Damascus covering Syria’s reform plans and the Sunni-Alawite divergences amongst the ruling elite. She then moved London, working for the BBC as a broadcast journalist, before returning to Turkey in late 2013. Her current work reports on a variety of issues including the Kurdish conflict, war in Syria, ethnic and sectarian conflicts, refugees, migration, Turkish foreign policy, EU, civil movements, sexual and bodily rights of women in Muslim societies, nature conservation and water policies, trans-boundary water conflicts, and environmental policies in conflict zones in the Middle East. Burçak is also the co-founder of the Press Research Centre (BAM), an independent civil society organisation, dedicated to strengthening and promoting freedom of the press. As part of her work at BAM, she has been running a database called Press In Arrest, a documentation and collective memory work concerning journalists prosecuted in Turkey. Burçak was the 2018 Feuchtwanger Fellow of Villa Aurora and Reporters Without Borders Germany and speaks English, Turkish, and Arabic.

Susan Youssef and Onur Burcak Belli

203-432-0061