Professor Nezar AlSayyad is an architect, planner, urban historian and public intellectual. He is a Professor of Architecture and Planning, at the University of California at Berkeley where he is also chaired the University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) for two decades until 2014. He also directed the Graduate Program in International and Area Studies, and the Ph.D Program in Architecture.

Ranjani Mazumdar is Professor of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender and the cinematic city. She is the author of Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (2007) and co-author with Nitin Govil of the forthcoming The Indian Film Industry (2015). Her writings have appeared in anthologies as well as in journals such as Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Screen, Social Research, Journal of Television and New Media, Economic and Political Weekly, Film International. She has also worked as a documentary film maker and her productions include Delhi Diary 2001 and The Power of the Image (Co-Directed)