Trained as a printmaker (B.A. in Fine Arts from Georgetown University), she earned a graduate degree in Liberal Studies from the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research in New York City, in 2000. Her involvement with film began with working at the Théâtre de Beyrouth, an independent cultural space that was a marker the city’s post-war cultural landscape for several years. She has administered the organization of a number of cultural events, including a tribute to Edward Said titled «For a Critical Culture» (Beirut, 1997), and a 3 months-long cultural season for the fiftieth commemoration of the tragedy of Palestine, titled «50, Nakba and Resistance» (Beirut, 1998). She collaborated on the organization of a number of festivals and international artistic manifestations, beginning with Moukhtar Kocache on the first Lebanese film and video festival in postwar Lebanon, titled «Image-Quest» (Beirut, 1995), and Ashkal Alwan, on the second and third editions of «Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices» (Beirut, 2003, 2005 and 2008). Recently, she collaborated with Métis Publishing in Turkey on the organization of a tribute to late professor Edward Saïd titled Waiting for the Barbarians (Istanbul, 2007).
After she moved to New York, and beginning in January of 2004, she started collaborating with ArteEast, a pioneering non-profit arts organization based in the city, first as the director of their film programs. In 2005 she was appointed as the director of CinemaEast Film Festival, a biennial festival of recent films from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas. In 2006, she curated a retrospective of Syrian cinema, which opened at the Lincoln Center in New York City, and toured in North America and the Arab world. On the occasion of the retrospective, she edited and translated a volume on Syrian cinema, published in collaboration between ArteEast and Rattapallax Press, titled Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Filmmakers.
Rasha Salti writes about artistic practice in the Arab world, film, and general social and political commentary. Her essays, articles and chronicles, have been published in Arabic and English, in publications such as al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt), The Jerusalem Quarterly Report (Palestine), Naqd (Algeria), MERIP (USA), Bidoun (USA), Mizna (US), The London Review of Books (UK), The Purple Journal (US/France), Afterall (US), Art Journal (US) in addition to contributions in catalogues for international festivals and artistic manifestations. In 2005, she earned the Phillip Shehadi award for new writing on the Middle East. She is presently collaborating with Lebanese photographer Ziad Antar on an exhibition and book titled Beirut Bereft, The Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict.
