Join internationally exhibited artist, filmmaker, and writer Mariam Ghani for a virtual conversation about two of her upcoming projects developed around the 100th anniversary of the 1918 pandemic. Watch clips from the film DIS-EASE, which examines themes of illness, otherness, and invasion. Then enjoy the short The Fire Next Time. This film traces the connection between epidemics and social upheaval from the 1800s to the present.

Ghani is joined in conversation by Saisha Grayson, time-based media curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Sabrina Sholts, curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Learn more about Ghani’s films, Sholts’s 2018 exhibit Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World, and how past health crises inform how we navigate COVID-19’s impact on our individual lives and societal landscapes.

Ghani’s documentary What We Left Unfinished (2019) is also available for viewing on the Women Filmmakers Virtual Festival webpage from Monday, March 15, to Sunday, March 22. Questions and comments submitted by viewers about this film will be discussed during this virtual program.

This program is made possible by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, Because of Her Story, and is co-presented with the National Museum of Natural History.

Image Credit: Mariam Ghani, Still from Dis-Ease (in progress); archival image originally from the Italian Red Cross- Appeal for Tuberculosis, 1920, Wellcome Collection, London, UK.