Kareem Estefan is a writer, editor, and Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, as well as a Fellow and Director of Studies in the History of Art at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Estefan recently completed a PhD dissertation on witnessing and/as worldbuilding in contemporary Palestinian visual culture at Brown University, with support from a 2021-2022 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Previously, he held the 2020-2021 Darat al-Funun Dissertation Fellowship, during which time he curated the online program “Worldbuilding in the Wake.” He has taught courses in film and media, visual culture, and writing at the American University of Beirut, Brown University, RISD, and SVA, and guest lectured at institutions including the City College of New York, Middlebury College, Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and USC. Estefan also serves as co-chair of the Middle East Caucus for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).
Estefan’s writing has been published in magazines and journals including 4 Columns, Art in America, Artforum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, e-flux, Feminist Media Histories, Frieze, Ibraaz, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, The New Inquiry, The New York Times T Magazine, Third Text, and World Records, among others. He is co-editor, with Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich, of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017), an anthology of essays by artists, curators, and scholars on boycott campaigns, transnational solidarities, and (self-)censorship in the arts.
Estefan has worked as an editor on a freelance basis, and at nonprofits in the arts and journalism. From 2012-2015, he was associate editor of Creative Time Reports, an online magazine of New York-based public art nonprofit Creative Time that featured artists' perspectives on international social and political issues. In another life, he hosted a WNYU 89.1FM/wnyu.org radio show about conceptual poetry and digital poetics, Ceptuetics, conducting interviews with some 30 writers that are now archived online at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound. Estefan holds a BA in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA in Art Criticism & Writing from SVA.