Baela Raza Jamil, CEO of Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA) centre for education and consciousness and the founder of the Children’s and Teachers’ Literature Festivals in Pakistan as a social movement called the Pakistan Learning Festival. She is an avid promoter of publications for children- a growing portfolio under ITA. A public policy advocate, for right to education 25A, ECCE, girls’ education and empowerment and public private partnerships, Baela leads the Learning initiative of ASER Pakistan, and foundational learning program Chalo Parho Barho(CPB)/ Teaching at the Right Level (TARL). She represents Pakistan as an advisor and board member for Education & Learning innovations at national and global levels.

Rumana Husain is a bilingual writer, educator, and artist. She has been a teacher at the Karachi Grammar School, Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture, and the CAS School, which she also headed. She co-founded the Bookgroup in 1988 for producing children’s books, teachers’ manuals, and trained teachers all over Pakistan. She later worked at the Children’s Museum for Peace and Human Rights as Head Activism & Outreach. From 2020 to October 2023 she worked as Team Leader for Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi’s Pakistan Literacy Project in partnership with Room to Read, for developing high-quality children’s books in Urdu. Rumana is the author of two coffee-table books: ‘Karachiwala – a Subcontinent within a City’, and ‘Street Smart – Professionals on the Street’. She has authored and/or illustrated over 75 children’s books for several publishers. Four of her books won awards in Pakistan, Nepal, and India. She was a co-founding Senior Editor of NuktaArt, an international art magazine, which was published for ten years. Rumana regularly contributes articles to national newspapers and magazines.

Stories are all around us, we just need to see them. In this theatrical storytelling workshop, participants will learn the art of storytelling and how to use the most important tool of a storyteller, their mind and body, to share stories about their communities in a fun way.

Vicky Zhuang Yi-Yin is a multi-disciplinary artist and storyteller from Pakistan. She is a first generation Pakistani born, Chinese immigrant. A lot of her work revolves around working on empowerment, diversity and finding strength from within and your identity. Vicky is a co-founder of OLOMOPOLO Media, which focuses on visual, media and performance arts in Pakistan and has created a safe space and platform for expression for young artists. At OLO, she regularly conducts and designs art and theatre activities for youths and young children to help them gain confidence and to learn to express themselves. She has also started The Cheeni Chronicles, a blog that follows her life as a Pakistani Chinese and documents the stories that she wants to tell through film, poetry and prose. She currently is a Drama teacher at prominent schools in Lahore. She is also a writer, director (for film and theater) and singer.

Shaza Farooq is a researcher and writer associated with Shehri Pakistan and Hashiya since 2023 and the project manager for the UNESCO-Shehri Pakistan Cultural Heritage Series. She is a graduate of the Lahore University of Management Sciences. 

Mariam Farooqi works as National Project Officer for Culture at the UNESCO Field Office in Islamabad. She is currently working on several UNESCO initiatives to safeguard tangible and intangible cultural heritage, and to integrate heritage and arts into learning in schools, museums, and cultural spaces.
She is a Fulbright alumna, and holds a Master’s degree in the History of Art and Archaeology from New York University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Humanities from the Lahore University of Management Sciences.