Sabine El Chamaa

Sabine El Chamaa is a filmmaker, artist and researcher. She holds a PhD in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London (2014), a Master of Fine Arts in Cinematic Arts (Film & TV Production) from the University of Southern California (1996) and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Arts (Radio, TV & Film) from the Lebanese American University (1991).

Her doctoral thesis, “Picturing Live War, a research practice in an installation and in a text”, supervised by Tony Dowmunt and Pasi Valiaho, is a practice-based research project carried out both as an installation and as a text. Her work addresses in particular the representation of war, memory, and the links between analogue photography and embodied memory.

From 2015 to 2022 she was Assistant Professor in the TV & Film department of the Lebanese American University (Beirut), where her teaching included scriptwriting, experimental cinema and a graduate module on women filmmakers. In 2022-2023 she was a Research Fellow at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York), where she taught two graduate seminars. She has also taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, Oxford Brookes University, the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) and the Doha Film Institute.

Her short films have been shown at many international festivals. Taleta (Un Mardi) won the Golden Bayard for Best Short Film at the 26th Namur International Francophone Film Festival (2011) and the Muhr Arab Best Short Film prize at the Dubai International Film Festival; Promenade, recipient of the Berlin Today Award production grant, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival (2009); How Beautiful is the Sea was selected for festivals including the Locarno International Film Festival and the Carthage Film Days. Her recent work combines film and performance, as in As if her song could have no ending (2023) and Beirut-Sarajevo Intersections (2023), a film-based lecture performance created with Gruia Badescu (University of Konstanz).

Her photographic and audiovisual works – Fårö - Beirut: Rememory in 3’s (Beirut, 2015) and Rememory (International University of Sarajevo, 2019) – extend ongoing research on the intersection of analogue photography and embodied memory. She has presented the papers and visual essays “This does not look like war” (UCL Institute of Archaeology, London, 2016) and “Rememories” (Birkbeck College, London, and Sarajevo, 2018).

Publications

• EL CHAMAA, Sabine (2014). Picturing Live War, a research practice in an installation and in a text. PhD thesis, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. research.gold.ac.uk