Viola Shafik

Viola Shafik is an Egyptian-German film theorist, curator, and filmmaker. Shafik was born in Schönaich, Germany, to an Egyptian father and a German mother. She studied Fine Arts at the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts as well as Middle Eastern studies and German literature at the University of Hamburg, finishing with her Ph.D. in 1994. Her dissertation, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, was published in English in 1998 by American University in Cairo Press. Shafik lived in New York in 1996 with support by a grant from the Rockefeller Humanities Foundation. Shafik has taught at the American University in Cairo and Zürich University. Further, she also worked as consultant for training initiatives La Biennale di Venezia, the al-Rawi Screenwriters Lab in Jordan, and the Dubai Film Connection. She also has curated film festivals and is member of the board of the World Cinema Fund of the Berlin International Film Festival. Also, Shafik has worked as translator for German television. In the academic year 2006/07, she was a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. From 2012 to 2014, she served as Head of Studies for the MENA (Middle East and North Africa region) Programme of Documentary Campus, a German programme focused on directing and producing documentary films in Middle Eastern and North African countries. In 2022, she was a member of the independent jury of Jordanian and Arab filmmakers for the Jordan Film Fund, awarding grants to film and TV projects of Jordanian filmmakers. Shafik based this 1998 book in English on her Ph.D. thesis, focusing on Arab cinema, both in the Arab world as well as presented in Germany. She discussed the artistic, political, historical and economic aspects of cinema and movie production in the Arab world. It was the first book in English about both the content and the forms of Arab cinema and was revised for a new edition in 2007. A review for Egypt Today magazine called it "a rich, multilayered (albeit academic) study," noting that "the inclusion of films from all over the Arab world is perhaps the book's greatest accomplishment, with large sections covering the often marginalized films of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco."