In this online event Dr Bea Lewkowicz will be in conversation with visual artist and lecturer Leslie Hakim-Dowek, and writer and academic Dr Jay Prosser.

Leslie and Jay will share their own academic and personal journeys of working with their Sephardi/Mizrahi family histories. We will explore the various ways we can connect to our pasts, through audio and video recordings, archives, family photographs and documents, historical photography, and other visual media.

Leslie Hakim-Dowek is a visual artist of Lebanese origin based in London. Her practice mainly focuses on issues of identity, migration and memory often combining photography, archival material and creative writing. She is a senior lecturer in photography at the University of Portsmouth and was the Visual Advisor for the AHRC's , Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories Research Project , which included a conference, workshops and an exhibition at Birkbeck College.

She curated the group exhibition East and West : Visualising the Ottoman City which took place at the Peltz Gallery (online version at: www.issuu.com/vtoc).

She has widely exhibited in the UK and abroad including group exhibitions including at Modern Art Oxford; Manchester City Art Gallery, Photofusion, the Impressions Gallery, National Media Museum and Montreal Mois de la Photo.

Jay Prosser is a Reader in Humanities at the University of Leeds, where he has taught since 1999. He is the 2020 winner of BIO's Hazel Rowley Prize for his proposal for The Camphorwood Chest: A Legacy of Loving Strangers, a biography that explores one Jewish family's experiences and connections across empires and centuries. Jay is driven by how we can connect personal stories with cultural history, in order to answer some of the big questions of our time.