Art director Cairo Video Festival (Medrar for Contemporary Art), artist and researcher.

Mena is a visual artist and researcher born in Cairo. Her practice is concerned with sensitive surfaces that carry knowledge and memory, the body and entropy. She received her degree in visual arts from the American University in Cairo. She is interested in exploring realms such as moving image and material object, erasure and embroidery, repetition and interruption. In 2013, she created ‘A Hail of Abuse’, a multi-media piece based on the «Poetry of Wine» poetic forms of the pre Islamic period and its recurring themes of death, rebellion, and sanctity. The project is based on a collaboration with women weavers on Aswan island, with whom she worked to produce tapestries that also act as sites for resurrecting these poetic personifications of wine – i.e. the figuration of a loss of consciousness that were once chronicled in the oral literature and have since faded from everyday memory. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo), Vivo Media Arts (Vancouver), Madatac (Spain), Ashkal Alwan (Beirut) and Palace of Arts- Cairo Opera House Complex (Cairo). Mena El Shazly has a well established curatorial practice and participated in organizing several video art events and workshops. She is the current artistic director of Cairo Video Festival for video art and experimental film organized by Medrar.