WOW Karachi team

Jude Kelly CBE is Artistic Director of Southbank Centre, Britain’s largest cultural institution.

She founded Solent People's Theatre and Battersea Arts Centre, and was the founding director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse.  In 1997 she was awarded an OBE for her services to theatre and in 2015 she was made a CBE for services to the Arts. She has directed over 100 productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company, to the Châtalet in Paris.

In 2002 Jude founded Metal, a platform where artistic hunches can be pursued in community contexts, with bases in Liverpool, Peterborough and Southend-On-Sea. 

Jude led the cultural team for the successful London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic bid and then served on the Board of the cultural Olympiad.

She is a regular broadcaster and commentator on a range of issues relating to society, art and education.

Domino Pateman is Senior Programmer, WOW - Women of the World, and has worked on the festival since its inception in 2010. She leads on programming for WOW London and global WOW festivals, with an overview of all programmatic content across all WOW presentations both nationally and internationally for Jude Kelly (Southbank Centre's Artistic Director and the founder and director of WOW). Since WOW began the movement has grown, with WOW festivals in 17 cities across 5 continents, with women and girls from Kathmandu to Karachi, Baltimore to Bradford connecting, celebrating and making new solutions together. Domino works on all the global festivals with local curating teams.

Sara Nisar is Manager Arts and Production at Salt Arts and an Associate Designer at Hasan Waliany Design Studio, with interests varying from arts management to activism. She is an alumna of the Department of Visual Studies, University of Karachi, and has been a part of teams leading public art and culture events, including Dil Phaink at the Alchemy Festival 2015 in London and the Birmingham Weekender Festival 2017.

She has previously been affiliated with PeaceNiche/The Second Floor, a Karachi-based community space working in the areas of arts & culture, technology, and advocacy, where she worked for over five years managing design and communications.

Sara is one of the founding curators for WOW - Women of the World Festival, Karachi.

Amneh Shaikh-Farooqui is a seasoned management-consulting professional and gender specialist with twelve years of experience in economic development, poverty reduction, environment and health initiatives. She holds a Masters degree in International Relations from the University of Karachi and a Masters in Public Policy with a specialisation in Development Administration from the Australian National University in Canberra where she received awards for the best research project and for being the most outstanding student of the year.

Amneh thrives on vision-casting and is passionate about ideas that can help transform development industry practices to support local economies and educate and empower individuals and small enterprises. She is a founding curatorial member for the Women of World festival, Karachi.

Faiza Mushtaq is a sociologist and chairperson of the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at IBA, Karachi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University. Her areas of research and teaching include culture, social movements, gender, religion and organisations. 

Gulnaz Anjum is Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at IBA, Karachi. She holds an MS and a PhD in Social Psychology from The New School in New York and the International Max Planck Research School in Germany, respectively. Her research and training areas include intergroup relations, gender inequality, positive wellbeing, humanism and multiculturalism. 

Naveen Zehra Minai holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and teaches in the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at IBA, Karachi. Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in film, television and literature.

Laila Premjee has been working with young children for two decades.  As an experienced Montessori teacher and an artist she combined her training and skills to set up a children's art studio called Saturday Studio.

Murtaza is the Managing Partner at Alternative Marketing Concepts. His portfolio includes projects pertaining to Digital Marketing, Content Management Systems and Digital Analytics. Murtaza worked with WOW Karachi in 2016 and provided a social hub solution which helped #WOWKHI capture captivating content from social media and leverage it for audience engagement and event amplification. He is the lead Digital Solution curator for the festival this year.

Aabida Ali is a young development professional and activist. She is member of Women Action Forum (WAF) and many regional peace networks and civil society forums. Aabida has worked with the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER) as a Programme Associate, Advocacy and Networking. Her areas of interest are human rights and labour rights and women's empowerment.