Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a filmmaker, curator, and professor at Brown University, where she teaches political theory through an anti-colonial lens, drawing on photography and material culture. She is the author of numerous books, including Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography, The Civil Contract of Photography, and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950.

Her film trilogy, Unlearning Imperial Plunder, includes Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder I (2019), The World Like a Jewel in the Hand (2023), and Alf layla wa layla (One Thousand and One Nights) (2025).

Golden Threads is Azoulay’s first children’s book. She wrote it as an invitation to her grandchildren—born after the destruction of the Jewish-Muslim world—to imagine and reconnect with that shared ancestral heritage. The story draws on her research for The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish-Muslim World (2024).

Azoulay lives in Pawtucket, Rhode Island (Photo: Yonatan Vinitsky).