Shahjehan Khan is a Boston-based voice artist, actor, producer and musician. He's the host of the "King of the World" podcast and co-founder of The Kominas.
Adam is a writer, theater-maker, and dramaturg who writes and develops plays that interrogate the intersections of queerness, immigration, and colonialism.
"To me it was always like, being Muslim is whatever you want it to be. If that's your background and it's no longer relevant to you or doesn't work for you, that's fine. Or if you're very queer and also very traditionally religious, of course that's fine. Or anything in between."
"The most important thing as a creative person is finding people who are willing to protect the sanctity, the originality of your idea. Not anyone and everyone can understand minute hints about cultural context [or the] religious sense that is inherent in our writing."
"I would say I am ambitious, overly ambitious. I'm extremely passionate about just making people laugh and smile. That is ultimately my goal with content creation [and] why I started it. I love just making people's days when I'm streaming."
Mahnoor is interested in exploring entertaining stories about the South Asian diaspora through the female gaze. With her films, she seeks to decolonize the mind by empowering audiences to engage in radical self-love. And if she can make you laugh while doing it, even better.
"We're entering a new period for Alzheimer's. I don't think a lot of people know about that. There are a couple of new drugs that received FDA approval over the last couple of years. [The research around Alzheimer’s] prevention and how to stay cognitively healthy has been very enlightening for me."
"It's important to keep holding government officials accountable, even if they're not giving you much or they're just reverting to talking points. You are questioning them before the public, on behalf of the public, in the interest of transparency and accountability."
"It seems like maybe 10 years ago, we'd experience one or two massive climate events and then we'd have a breather, and [it would be] a while before something like that happened again. And now I feel it's just been a succession of one thing after the next."
"I think what is so cool about the stuff I'm watching these days is the commonplace-ness, the sort of 'normalcy' of intersectional stories. I think people are not afraid to represent intersectional identities in a way that doesn't feel distracting from the story."
Mommying While Muslim's greatest desire is to learn from and validate their Muslim American sisters, offer support, and work together to find solutions and relevant resources to help each other thrive.
As a kid, obviously I loved a lot of comic books and TV shows and film, and I think the next gradual step from that is to just love film in general. Like as a kid, I loved movies, but it was the superhero part that really got me into it a lot more.
