My work understands sustainability as a transformative process. 

If innovation ecosystems are to survive and thrive, we will need to rethink how the future is imagined. There is no simple elixir to the question of sustaining and maintaining necessary, increasingly precarious, largely underfunded public interest tools, infrastructure, research. The answer to sustaining impossible practices may instead be to ask different questions.

I bring a global, justice-centered perspective to philanthropy, public policy, and community-led institution building. I work with technologists, artists, and researchers to imagine and build flexible infrastructures to support their work. In my present role as Director of Partnerships at Code for Science and Society, I work with public technologists to develop the social, cultural, and political implications of their organizational structures and processes. In rethinking what we are building and for whom, my work helps partners identify what can be meaningfully cared for, where succession can be found, and what cessation is possible.

I completed a PhD in Theatre and Performance at the City University of New York in 2016. From 2011-2019, my ethnographic research followed experimental musicians and performers in their search for political belonging in the years after the Arab Uprisings. I have held teaching and research positions in Anthropology, Middle East Area Studies, and Global Media and Communication.

Whether I am working with artists, community organizers, or open source enthusiasts, I am attuned to how subcultural communities relate to mainstream politics. A Lebanese and Palestinian-American with roots across Southwest Asia, I am committed to continuous, decolonial exploration of how to build solidarity. I look for and uphold the interdisciplinary and the intersectional as the fulcrums for building and leveraging distributed power.

Let’s connect! You can reach me at rayyaelz [at] gmail [dot] com or via socials below.