Core Team
Misbah Azhar (2018-
Misbah is a graduate of Habib University in Communication & Design, currently working on her social initiative called 'Maidan' which aims to provide accessibility to playing opportunities to street kids.
Asmara Faiq (2018-
Asmara graduated from Habib University, with a degree in Communication & Design and a minor in Literature. She dabbles in poetry and film, and is currently compiling subjective maps of North Karachi.
Aamir Habib (2015-2017)
Aamir, originally from Kohat, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, has been exhibiting extensively, especially on the local circuit, in some of the leading galleries such as Canvas Art, Koel and VM Art galleries. He has been taking part in international shows in Dubai with Carbon 12, as well as more recently with AB Gallery, Lucerne, Switzerland. His work has been shown at Scope Basal 2013 and 2014, the Abu Dhabi Art Fair 2013 and the Moscow Biennale, 2014.
Umar Hameed (2018-
Umar Hameed is a designer and educationist with Masters in Design Innovation and Media Studies. Along with his teaching and industrial experience he has engaged in numerous community engagement and empowerment projects emphasizing the role of Design as a specialized discipline where the overarching theme has been to address the importance of unlearning in order to learn as a two-way effort to shape knowledge and foster a critical understanding of our cultural milieu.
Some of his projects include IN Design Curricula where he conducted workshops and produced artworks with school children as part of Totally Thames Festival 2013, 2014 in their annual exhibition titled ‘Rivers of The World’. He is a Researcher and Art Director for The History Project ‘s publication ‘Partitioned Histories: The Other Side of Your Story’ in 2016. He was also the Team Leader in BNU, Lahore Biennale Foundation, Danish Cultural Organization CKU’s collaborative project ‘Stories We Tell’ for working with the Mirasi community of Lahore.
Umar has participated in Fabrica’s Imago Mundi 2017 and has been a co-principal Investigator for HEC’s Thematic Research Grant 2017, ‘Furthering the Foundation Model in Art and Design Higher Education in Pakistan’. He was also the main organizer, researcher and conductor of ‘Design Thinking’ workshop for Summer School in Social Innovation Academy, Uganda, 2017.
Umar is currently the Head of Department of Foundation Year Studies in Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Design, Lahore.
Tahera Hasan (2015-
Tahera specializes in family law and deals with International adoption cases, custody cases, divorce matters and family settlements. Tahera works on advisory work (including regulatory and licensing) in media and entertainment-related matters. Tahera is also the Director of the Imkaan Welfare Organisation which is a not for profit organisation. Imkaan provides primary health care services in Machar Colony in Karachi, deals with infanticide and the placement of abandoned children with adoptive families and is in the process of setting up a recreation centre in Machar Colony. She is a member of the Executive Committee and Organising Committee of the KaraFilm Society, on the Board and Editorial board of the Book Group.
Dr Umair Afzar Khan (2018-
Dr Khan has always been passionate about computer games from the early days of Commodore 64 when a game was considered to be a good game with graphics if its size was bigger than 256 Kilobytes. His interest brought him into the realm of Computer Science where he found out that there is much more to games than fancy graphics. His research took him through the fields of Software Engineering and Design, and applying graph theory techniques for Artificial Intelligent Decision Making through Planning.
With the development of countless game engines and his own experience with making games and teaching at various universities, Dr. Khan aims to make game development easy enough so that anyone can make the game they want. This will include art development, artificially intelligent programming and multiplatform deployment. With Habib University’s emphasis on social sciences, he aims to make games that are not only fun to play, but also cover many social issues that are present in our current society, to spread awareness and provide help by disseminating information.
Zoha Jabbar (2018-
Zoha Jabbar is a writer and designer from Karachi. She just graduated from Habib University where she studied Communication and Design. She is also a performance poet and has performed at various venues across Pakistan.
Mahim Maher (2015-
Mahim is a journalist who writes about urban issues in Karachi.
Tahir Mahmood (2018-
Meher Malik (2018-
Meher Malik graduated from Habib University with a major in Communication Studies & Design and a minor in English Literature. She recently worked on a series of stories of women called 'WOVEN' where their stories were told through visually through embroidery on objects that represented them.
Saadia Pathan (2018-
Saadia Pathan is a recent graduate from Habib University, where she studied Communication Design and Literature. Her recent work intersection of literature and the visual arts. She enjoys writing, music and magic on the side. She is currently a TA at Habib University and intends to continue her studies in literature.
Dr Syeda Saleha Raza (2016-2017)
Dr. Raza is an Assistant Professor in Habib University's Computer Sceince Department. She has completed her Ph.D. at the Artifical Intelligence Lab at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi. During the Ph.D., she was awarded the Australian Endeavour Scholarship’ 2011 and visited Quantum Computation and Intelligent System (QCIS) lab, University of Technology, Sydney as a doctoral fellow. She is passionate about the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and is excited to use AI to solve real-world problems. Dr. Raza has been actively involved in the areas of Robotics, Machine Learning, Probabilistic Reasoning and Computational Intelligence. She played a crucial role in developing a robot soccer team at IBA named KarachiKoalas. KarachiKoalas participated in World RoboCup Soccer Simulation 3D league in 2011 – 2013, and was the first ever team from Pakistan that participated in this competition.
Ali Rizvi (2018-
Ali Rizvi is an aspiring filmmaker. He graduated with a BA Hons in Communication and Design from Habib University. He is also an ACCA affiliate. Ali founded Ehsas Films Project in 2015 and has produced a few short films. Sapna, his film on a transgender person's struggles, won the Best Film Award at International Travel South Asia Film Festival in 2016. He loves travelling, and likes to capture people and their cultures through his lens.
Saima Zaidi (2015-
Saima Zaidi is a Karachi-based communication designer. She has researched, edited and designed the book Mazaar, Bazaar: Design and Visual Culture in Pakistan published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, in collaboration with the Prince Claus Fund Library, Amsterdam.
She is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Communication Studies and Design at Habib University, Karachi and visiting faculty at the Department of Visual Studies, University of Karachi, Karachi. She has been teaching concepts of design, typography, design studio and visual intervention in public space. She studied at the National College of Arts, Lahore, and the Pratt Institute, New York.
Sohail Zuberi (2015-2018)
Sohail Zuberi is an artist and graphic designer, trained and based in Karachi. He's held positions at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi University and the Textile Institute of Pakistan. His latest exhibition, Archaeologies of Tomorrow, explored humankind's relationship with Karachi's coastline, through encounters with nature and the pieces of civilisation we leave behind.