The Spring 2026 Central Asia & Diaspora Futures Symposium featured four speakers on Zoom. The symposium was led by students in the class.
The speakers who came were: Afghan-American music archivist Omid Jahan; London-based filmmaker Makez Rikweda; Ughur actor and screenwriter Dralla Aierken; and LA-based filmmaker Ali Baluch.
Omid Jahan
Bio from Killah’s introduction: Omid Jahan is an Afghan-American archivist, collector, DJ based in the Bay Area. Is work preserves and shares the sounds and stories of Afghanistan’s music and culture in the country and diaspora. He founded the Afghan Cassette Archive which digitizes and documents rare radio and television recordings. These archival sounds have been spread globally, from LA, to NY to Munich. He also runs Analog Afghan, a label that focuses on cassettes and vinyls, reissuing historic recordings and supporting contemporary sounds.
Makez Rikweda
Bio from Kitty’s introduction: Makez Rikweda is a London-based writer, director and producer. Her films explore identity, memory, displacement, and the human experience. Her documentary Young Afghans follows university students navigating life. Her work allows audiences to see the resilience of Afghan communities. Along with her award-winning filmmaking, she has produced documentaries for organizations and broadcasters such as Al Jazeera English, the BBC and Sky News. Her film Sound of Birds played in the symposium room as she answered questions.
Dralla Aierken
Bio from Mia’s introduction: Dralla Aierken is an Uyghur-born-Chinese actress and writer based in LA. She began acting in Beijing at 19 after realizing performance was a thing she needed to do to “not not be happy.” She found that she was most alive when she was on stage portraying characters. She moved to LA for film and television after acting in New York and Boston. Her film credits include “My Mother Thinks I Suck” and “Mrs. Gu and Her Armchair.”
Ali Baluch
Bio from his introduction: Ali Baluch is a filmmaker based in LA, and has been in the industry for fourteen years. He has worked at Nickelodeon, HBO and MTV. His current project is with a group of Gen-Z who does not know about MTV; he worked there for ten years and was a producer. He got his start in slapstick humor Youtube pranks with FouseyTube. These were staged pranks with hired actors who were given a few directional notes. The first videos got hundreds of views; the next videos got a million views, then five million, twenty million, one hundred million views and so on. In this process he learned the power of thumbnails, titles and audience retention.
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