About us
A non-profit organization founded by anthropologists, oral-historians and writers, Anam Zakaria and Haroon Khalid, Qissa is a storytelling platform that documents, archives, and exhibits oral histories of immigrants to Canada. Telling the stories of immigrants in their own voices, Qissa challenges the western gaze through which stories of immigrants are framed. Starting as an artistic collective in 2020, Qissa incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2024.
Anam Zakaria
Anam Zakaria is an oral historian and author of three books and dozens of articles focusing on violence, memory, narrative-making and otherization. As the co-founder of Qissa, Anam currently documents oral histories of immigrants to Canada with the aim of challenging the western gaze through which stories of immigrants are usually framed. She is the winner of the 2017 KLF-German Peace Prize for her book, The Footprints of Partition.
Haroon Khalid
Co-Founder Qissa, Haroon Khalid has an academic background in anthropology. He is the author of five books, and has written several articles for different media publications, about minority rights, folk traditions, politicization of history and heritage, nationalism and identity, and several other topics