Speaker Bios

Nermeen Shaikh is a co-host and senior producer at Democracy Now! She worked briefly at Al Jazeera English in Washington, D.C. before joining Democracy Now! in 2011.

She serves on the Board of Directors of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.

She was previously the Managing Editor at Asia Society and a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. She has also worked at development and research organizations in Islamabad and Tehran.

Shaikh is the author of The Present as History: Critical Perspectives on Global Power (Columbia University Press) and the editor of Slums, Security and Shelter in Pakistan (Vanguard Books).

She has been an invited speaker on issues ranging from global politics and independent media to psychoanalysis and literature at venues including the United Nations, the psychoanalysis division of the American Psychological Association, and the European Association for Commonwealth Literature. She has presented a TEDx talk in Budapest and been a featured speaker at the Toronto International Film Festival.

She has also served on the jury of the Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards.

In addition, Shaikh has appeared in contemporary art exhibitions including at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as an interpreter/participant in Tino Sehgal’s “This Progress” and as an actor in Philippe Parreno’s film installation, “The Crowd” at the Park Avenue Armory.

She starred in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s short film as “the Radio” in the 2020 series titled “Homemade”.

Shaikh has a B.A. (Honours) in political studies from Queen’s University and an M.Phil. in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University.