Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

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This program brings together artist Sean Connelly (2025 Artist-in-Residence, A/P/A Institute at NYU), curator and writer Nadine Fattaleh (Fall 2024 Student Artist-in-Residence, A/P/A Institute at NYU), Professor Nour Joudah (UCLA), and Professor Brandy Nālani McDougall (University of Hawaiʻi and 2023-25 Hawaiʻi State Poet Laureate) to draw connections between Hawaiʻi and Palestine, with a focus on food sovereignty, land, and mapping Indigenous resistance. 

Connelly shares his artistic and mapping projects on Native Hawaiian ahupuaʻa (geologic subdivision) systems and aloha ʻāina (love of the land) projects.

Fattaleh will speak about the work of Palestinian cooperative farms in the occupi West Bank, highlighting grassroots efforts to resist the political and ecological violence of the Israeli occupation.

Professor Joudah will present her research on both Native Hawaiian and Palestinian struggles for liberation, highlighting how Indigenous countermapping is both a cartographic and decolonial praxis.

Professor McDougall reads her award-winning poetry about the profound relationships Kanaka ʻŌiwi have with the ʻāina, and the ways that the realities of living under occupation echo between Hawaiʻi and Palestine.

In addition to thinking through points of connection between Indigenous resistance in both Hawaiʻi and Palestine, this event serves as a bridge between Fattaleh and Connelly’s residencies at the A/P/A Institute at NYU. Professor Andrew Ross moderates this special evening.

This discussion is part of our year-long programming theme, “Asian/Pacific/American Prospects,” with which we ask how A/P/A perspectives might provide compelling modes for confronting the many, proliferating crises of concern to our communities and imagining futures beyond them. 

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms, and a lactation room available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu

Sean Connelly is an artist based in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Connelly works across disciplines, including sculpture, architecture, film, and cartography, engaging a larger collaborative decolonial social practice supporting Native liberation in Hawai‘i and beyond. Connelly is the founding director of After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and the nonprofit Hawai‘i Nonlinear. Connelly’s work supports Native artists, cultural practitioners, and grassroots groups who build and care for the physical wellbeing of Hawai‘i built environments in the protective form of ‘āina (Land / That Which Feeds). Connelly is the 2025 Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian researcher, writer, and translator from Amman. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her translation of Khadijeh Habashneh’s Knights of Cinema: The Story of the Palestine Film Unit was published in May 2023. She has worked on film and public programs at Anthology Film Archives, Upstate Films, Maysles Documentary Center, Palestine Cuts, MMAG Foundation, and Mosaic Rooms. She contributes to a number of volunteer initiatives including the Palestine Film Index, an open access compilation of Palestinian cinema resources, and the Palestinian Social Fund, a grassroots, solidarity-based fund supporting agricultural cooperatives in the Occupied West Bank. Her writings have appeared in World Records, Seen Journal, Broudou Magazine, Science for the People Magazine, Jadaliyya, and n+1. She was the Fall 2024 Student Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Nour Joudah is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation, “Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine,” on the efforts by Palestinian and Native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering Indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and Indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how Indigenous countermapping is both a cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine.

Photograph by Jen May Pastores.