Samuels Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation (COMPACT)

Date and time TBD.

Samira Saraya is an actor, writer, director, spoken word artist, musician and LGBTQ activist. She was born in Haifa in 1975.  In her early twenties, she began performing as a drag king while working as a nurse. She won the Acco Festival Award for unique acting in 2012; Fringe Theatre Award for 2015 and 2017; Best Actress Award in the 2017 Jerusalem Film Festival (JFF); and the Best Script Award for her short film Polygraph of 2018 at TLVFest. Samira graduated from Tel Aviv University with a degree in directing and debuted with Polygraph in 2020. She is also a member of the System Ali band. She just completed shooting her second short film, Kisui (Cover).

resources for Additional learning

Co-presented with The Mandel Center for the Humanities and CAST.

October 16, 2025

Time: 2:20-3:50 pm
Room: Olin-Sang 101

Indigenous Canadian artist Jaime Black-Morsette (Red River Métis) created The REDress Project to bring attention to and inspire action against the enormous amount of violence inflicted against Indigenous women, girls, and 2-spirit people across Canada. She hung empty red dresses, representing those who are no longer here, in public spaces -- in parks, in front of libraries, by the roadside -- as well as in galleries and on university campuses. Her art spread throughout both Canada and the United States as a message to the missing and murdered themselves, as support to impacted families, and as a call to action. A new book, which she edited, highlights the REDress Project's impact, including its relationship to a national inquiry into this violence on the part of the Canadian government. 

Jaime Black-Morsette lives and works on her home territory near the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. She has been using their art practice as a way to gather community and create action and change around the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls across Turtle Island for more than 15 years. Black-Morsette’s interdisciplinary art practice includes immersive film and video, installation art, photography, and performance art practices. Her work explores themes of memory, identity, place and resistance.

Resources for Additional learning

October 28, 2024

Presentation by Maria Pinto, writer, collagist and naturalist

Time: 3:30 - 5:00 pm
Room: TBD

Maria Pinto is an author and educator living in the Boston area, originally from the Dominican Republic. She teaches for the literary nonprofit GrubStreet, and her work has appeared or will appear in Orion Magazine, Obsidian, Necessary Fiction, and Arnoldia, among other publications. She has led workshops and given lectures for mycological societies in New York, Texas, Wisconsin, and California, and she leads regular forays at Arnold Arboretum. Her book of essays inspired by mushrooms, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival is forthcoming from Great Circle Books this autumn.