Photography “speaks directly to your emotions,” says Joumana El Zein Khoury, executive director of World Press Photo, which holds the world’s leading contest for news and documentary photography. Since she joined in 2021, she has organized six new global partnerships to “be our guides” and diversify the images and themes that earn annual awards for top visual storytelling. And she isn’t a photographer.

In 1884, a 23-year-old painter named Étienne Dinet took a break from Paris to travel to Algeria, where he became a prominent Orientalist artist—a European depicting scenes of cultures not his own. In the 1990s, art collector Shafik Gabr noticed that Dinet stood out among a number of Orientalists whom Gabr says approached their work as an “art of face-to-face engagement between East and West.” Gabr credits Dinet and other “respectful observers” with the inspiration to inaugurate East-West: The Art of Dialogue, an annual intercultural encounter program for emerging leaders.

It wasn’t until he found himself thousands of kilometers from his native Australia in September 2001 that Coller, a UCLA-Irvine professor of history, began to realize that his seemingly disparate early interests in French culture, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, his longing to understand the Middle East and his determination to speak Arabic were all parts of his innate fascination with people. 

This hearty beef stew, a type of yakhni, or popular stew, is served with rice in the Syrian style.

Little explored for tourism and not a popular destination even among locals, this section of the Tien Shan mountains, some 360 kilometers east of Bishkek, Kyrgystan’s capital, lies near the border with China.

The black eyeliner known widely today as kohl was used much by both men and women in Egypt from around 2000 BCE—and not just for beauty or to invoke the the god Horus. It turns out kohl was also good for the health of the eyes, and the cosmetic’s manufacture relied on the world’s first known example of “wet chemistry”—the use of water to induce chemical reactions.

Walk into any mosque and at its front you are likely to see a stepped pulpit: the minbar. In Egypt, under the patronage of the Mamluk sultans of the 13th to 15th century, minbars became masterpieces of woodworking—most without nails or glue. Today nearly four dozen Mamluk minbars stand as a priceless but vulnerable heritage: A recent rash of thefts led to the Rescuing the Mamluk Minbars of Cairo Project, which offers protection, promotion and new opportunities for young artisans.