Introducing Grounded Knowledge Graduate Student Summer Interns

Nicole Bekesz is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist and Geography PhD student at the University of Minnesota, dedicated to intersectional justice and community-engaged research. As a first-generation student, Nicole is passionate about removing the black box of institutionalized knowledge, drawing on her training in critical geography, public sociology, and creative nonfiction to make research accessible and co-created. Her professional and volunteer background—ranging from grant work for the Ohio Department of Development to teaching creative writing for Cow Tipping Press—has solidified her belief that storytelling is a powerful tool for self-advocacy and envisioning just futures.

Nicole is excited to intern with Amplify MN and have the opportunity to engage creative methods in more grounded and meaningful ways. She seeks to develop her skills in relational methods of community engagement and co-creation and effectively leverage her humanistic social sciences training to support the work of disability justice organizations.

Tasneem Alzamara is a Palestinian journalist, filmmaker, and PhD student in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. She brings over twenty years of experience in war journalism and documentary filmmaking to her internship with the Soomaal House of Art. Her background in covering displacement and state violence has shaped a professional practice rooted in decolonial analysis and the ethical stewardship of community memory.

Tasneem is drawn to Soomaal House of Art’s collective process of sustaining cultural knowledge as a form of resilience, continuity, and future-making. She hopes to gain a deeper understanding of how community-centered arts organizations sustain themselves while remaining accountable to the communities they serve. Having worked extensively with refugees and marginalized groups, Tasneem also seeks to practice archival work as an essential form of resilience,  particularly for communities navigating migration and colonization.

Fatemeh Nasr-Esfahani is a PhD candidate in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota whose work bridges the gap between creative storytelling and rigorous social inquiry. With over a decade of experience in applied social research and arts-based, community-centered initiatives, she is committed to exploring how cultural expression can foster connection, resistance, and social change. Her recent internship with Mizna, a Minneapolis-based arts organization supporting Arab and Southwest Asian and North African communities, further deepened her engagement with storytelling as a collaborative and community-rooted practice. She is interested in interning with The SEAD Project because she sees storytelling as a vital infrastructure for collective memory and social justice. Fatemeh views stories not merely as narratives, but as a form of living knowledge that emerges from families and intergenerational memory rather than institutional authority.

Fatemeh's expertise in qualitative research, digital outreach, and public programming allows her to approach community engagement with both analytical depth and cultural humility. She is particularly drawn to SEAD's mission as an opportunity to connect her doctoral research—focused on humor and performance as forms of resistance—to real-world efforts in cultural preservation and community empowerment. By centering the ethics of reciprocity and care, she hopes to contribute her skills in documentation and collaborative planning to support Southeast Asian diaspora communities, ensuring that knowledge production remains a non-extractive, shared process that honors lived experience and fosters long-term solidarity.

Mohammadreza Izadi is a PhD student in Theatre Historiography and Performance Studies at the University of Minnesota, as well as a director, researcher, and performer from Kerman, Iran. They hold a BA in Stage Design and an MA in Puppet Theatre from the University of Tehran. Their work explores experimental performance, protest, improvisation, digital liveness, community, and alternative archives, with a focus on embodied memory, disappearance, and archive of absence.

Part of their research and artistic practice asks how scholarship can become more accessible, participatory, and embodied: something people can experience, enter, and contribute to, rather than only read. Through digital storytelling, practice-based research, and interactive formats such as 3D navigable platforms, they work to transform static academic forms into living spaces of encounter. Their current projects examine performance as a method for building solidarity across borders, especially among communities shaped by migration, censorship, displacement, and political repression.

Through this internship, Mohammadreza seeks to bring their experience in digital archive design, UX/UI documentation, and participatory research to support The SEAD Project’s storytelling initiatives. They are eager to learn how ethical narrative stewardship and community-centered project management function within real organizational conditions.