Programmes And Innovations Officer
CurrentAwarded the Cosmopolitan India Blogger Awards for ‘LGBTQIA+ Voice of the Year 2022’, The Queer Muslim Project is Asia’s leading online platform for Queer, Muslim and allied voices, with a growing global community of over 41,000 people. We use art, culture, media, and storytelling to challenge harmful stereotypes and norms, build power and visibility of underserved LGBTQIA+ artists and storytellers, and enable them to shape their own narratives. Our vision is to establish a creative pipeline for Queer artists, storytellers, writers and organisers from underrepresented communities to take up transformative leadership roles everywhere that content is created: films, television, social media, publishing, and social change movement building. We are the lead curator for British Council’s Five Films For Freedom program in India. In 2022, we delivered an international poetry residency as part of British Council’s India/UK Together Season of Culture program - Language is a Queer Thing - featuring 6 diverse Queer spoken word poets from India and the UK, with showcases at major festivals like BBC Contains Strong Language in Birmingham and Tata Literature Live in Mumbai. Our current programs include The Queer Writers’ Room, a creative writing and narrative change program for young South Asian writers in the age group 18-25, supported by the U.S. Consulate General Mumbai.In 2020, we partnered with Instagram to produce ‘Safe and Strong: An LGBTQIA+ Guide to Facebook and Instagram’. Together with the British Council and Instagram, we hosted two editions of our Digital Pride Festival in June 2020 and 2021, focused on celebrating and platforming LGBTQIA+ artists and creators in South Asia. As part of our strategic efforts to combat religious extremism in South & South East Asia, we continue to organise the Interfaith Preconference at the ILGA Asia Conference, in collaboration with GIN-SSOGIE - the recent one being held in Ho Chi Minh City in November 2022.
