Announcing our 2025-26 Displaced Artist Residents
A Belarusian journalist and Palestinian artists are next year’s Displaced Artists at Reid Hall
Launched in September 2023 by the Columbia Global Paris Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the Reid Hall Displaced Artists Initiative supports artists across disciplines—film, visual art, dance, and performance. It follows an earlier residency dedicated exclusively to Ukrainian artists (2021–2022), known as the Harriman Residency.
In line with the Paris Center’s commitment to free press and its work with journalists and nonprofits, this year’s residency includes a journalist-in-residence. Hanna Liubakova, an exiled journalist and political analyst from Belarus.
A non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, Hanna Liubakova has reported for The Washington Post, The Economist, and other international outlets. She was sentenced in absentia to 10 years in prison by the Lukashenko regime, and is currently on a wanted list in Russia and CIS countries.
She began her career at Belsat TV, an independent Belarusian station banned by the regime, and later worked with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. A finalist for the European Press Prize, Liubakova has received numerous honors, including the Freedom of the Media Award and the One Young World Journalist of the Year Award.
During her residency at Reid Hall, Liubakova will focus on completing her book Exiled Voice: Preserving Belarus’s Story, under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. The book blends investigative reporting, personal narrative, and political analysis to document the Belarusian resistance movement since 2020, highlighting voices often overlooked in Western media — including political prisoners, underground educators, digital dissidents, and women leaders.
Due to delays caused by the war in Gaza, the 2024 residency period has been extended to accommodate two artists, Maha Al-Daya and Doha Kahlout, whose arrivals were staggered. Their residencies will now continue into 2025.
Maha Al-Daya has already made a strong impact at Reid Hall and in France. Shortly after her arrival, she met with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Institut du monde arabe. She offered him two of her embroideries as a gift and discussed the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
This spring, she held a residency at Atelier 11, presenting her series The Path of Pain—a body of work exploring Palestinian cultural heritage and displacement through traditional embroidery.
Al-Daya also participated in Art in Times of War, organized by Institute Fellow and GSAPP professor Hiba Bou Akar. The event brought together artists to discuss how cities and communities navigate post-conflict spaces, through art installations exploring identity and spatial justice.
While still stranded in Gaza in January 2025, Doha Kahlout organized her first Reid Hall event, Artmaking in Crisis, featuring performances, poetry, and a film screening. Highlights included poetry readings by Kahlout and her students, music by Bashar Murad, a reading by author Karim Kattan, and a screening of Bye Bye Tibériade with director Lina Soualem.
In June, Kahlout also participated in two panels of Palestinian poets at the Marché de la poésie in Paris.