Although now one of the most acclaimed writers in the Arabic world, Ibrahim al-Koni spent his earliest years completely immersed in the language and stories of Tuareg oral culture-a historically nomadic Berber tribe in northwest Libya.

Photography “speaks directly to your emotions,” says Joumana El Zein Khoury, executive director of World Press Photo, which holds the world’s leading contest for news and documentary photography. Since she joined in 2021, she has organized six new global partnerships to “be our guides” and diversify the images and themes that earn annual awards for top visual storytelling. And she isn’t a photographer.

Except for a rare self-portrait, Bibi Zogbé painted flowers—exuberant and confident, as well as modern and symbolic, her paintings reflect her life between her native Lebanon and three decades in Argentina.

Telling stories about life journeys may not be what most people think tap dancers do, but that is where Andrew Nemr taps his way into a deeper root of the art.

Working with civic reality as an architect and personal imagination as a novelist, Alaa Halifi has, at age 23, already won awards in both fields. His subject: his city, Casablanca.

It was time for the family to sit down for dinner at Nawal Nasrallah’s home in Bloomington, Indiana. Nasrallah had made her 18-year-old daughter Iba’s favorite dish, Iraqi-style eggplant biryani, in honor of the college acceptance letter Iba had just received. Iba spooned the biryani onto her plate, took a bite and burst into tears. “Where am I going to find food like this at school?” she asked.

Photojournalist Tor Eigeland set sail from his hometown of Oslo in 1947 at age 16, and he never looked back until he had completed his last photography assignment, in Tangier for AramcoWorld in 2016.

Born in a village in northwest Algeria, Cheika Remitti sang high-energy songs of love, loss and society that pioneered rai music. Beloved by fans for more than 60 years until her death in 2006, her influence and popularity endure.

“What does it mean to develop a complex sense of Arab American identity in film?” asks Waleed F. Mahdi, whose comparative and detailed analysis of three motion picture industries—Hollywood, Egyptian and Arab American—searches for an answer to that question.