Aïda Muluneh  Founder / Director

Born in Ethiopia in 1974, Aïda Muluneh left the country at a young age and spent an itinerant childhood between Yemen and England. After several years in a boarding school in Cyprus, she finally settled in Canada in 1985. In high school, inspired partly by distorted media images of the Ethiopian famine, she began taking photographs.

After studying film at Howard University in Washington, D.C., she went on to work as a freelance photographer for The Washington Post. Then in 2003, Aïda was chosen to be part of the groundbreaking show "Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. Later that same year, she made an appearance on “Imágenes Havana” a group photography exhibition in Havana, Cuba - the same fortuitous encounter that led to the film "The Unhealing Wound.” As with her photographs, she continues in this powerful documentary to explore her own stated fascination with "how much cultural retention is possible without, necessarily, cultural interaction."

Aïda’s work can be found in permanent collections of several Museums in the United State. She is also the recipient of the European Union Prize for her work on Ethiopia in the 2007-7th Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, in Bamako, Mali.

Aïda’s photography has been published on THE WASHINGTON POST, NEW HOUSE NEWS SERVICE, BBC, and THE NEW YORK TIMES.  Also a collection of her exhibited work is in the book ETHIOPIAN PASSAGES: CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE DIASPORA.

Saurabh Khetrapal  Executive Producer

Born in India, having spent his formative years growing up in the East African coastal cities of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) and Mombassa (Kenya), and now living in New York, Saurabh can truly claim to be “of the Earth”, which incidentally is the literal meaning of his last name. His perspectives on the world, its history, events and peoples are unconventional, which is evident in his writing style and his film works. Saurabh started writing at a young age, for the first few years in Hindi and subsequently in English and French. He is currently writing a feature-length screenplay that delves into the deeper layers of Middle Eastern and Arab culture, values and family life.

Saurabh has been instrumental in the production of various film and video projects including electronic press kits for artists signed to record labels like Velour Music Group; music videos of Montreal-based Haitian artists Vox Sambou (of Nomadic Massive) and Sara Renelik; and Good Grapes, a documentary about African-American winemakers in California.

Saurabh is passionate about economic and social development in the developing world and runs a non-profit organization that provides educational opportunities to the under-privileged in Africa. He is also a successful entrepreneur, having founded and spearheaded various successful business ventures, and an inventor with several patents to his credit.