Jana Elkhatib

Jana Omar Elkhatib is a Palestinian-Canadian artist and writer. Her work across performance, sound, fiction and research-based interdisciplinary practice engages the complexities of counter-historical production, the politics of evidence and testimony, and the reimagining of collective ways of knowing, listening and truth-telling. Her performance and sound work has engaged Palestinian oral tradition and the voice; her fiction is often preoccupied by the polyvocal and oral/aural nature of familial narratives spanning historical moments in Amman, Beirut, Gaza, Haifa, Saida, the UAE and beyond. Charged with an ethic of withholding or what Édouard Glissant calls “the right to opacity,” her work does not attempt to reconstitute or merely inscribe the past, but to produce poetic responses to histories all too resistant to reconstitution.

Elkhatib’s work has been supported by the Banff Centre, Hamilton Artists Inc, La Corvée Paris, La Centrale Galerie Montreal, 7a*11d Festival Toronto and the Canada Council for the Arts, among others. Elkhatib holds an MFA in fiction from Brown, where she was awarded the Feldman Prize (2023) and Frances Mason Harris Prize (2024), the latter for a book-length manuscript for which she will soon be pursuing publication. Her work has been featured in Canadian Art magazine, and her writing is forthcoming in Brick magazine. She has taught fiction at Brown and will be teaching a Wintersession course at RISD titled Personal Fictions in the Essay Film, Performance Lecture, and Other Hybrid Forms and THAD sections in the spring.