Maryam Kiyani is an Islamabad-based researcher, writer, and policy practitioner.
She received her BA Hons. in history from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). During this time, she explored themes of imperialism in South Asia, colonization and decoloniality, state-citizen relationship, and alternate/(re)imagined histories. She leaned on oral histories, archives, and qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Her thesis was “Kashmir as a State of Exception: Naked, Debilitated, Ungrievable and Defiant Bodies”. It engaged with autobiographic and fictional accounts written by Kashmiris in an inter-textual manner with scholarly work of historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists in an attempt to understand the bodily experience of living under occupation.
She feels passionately about using the visual medium to tell stories. For a brief year after graduation, she worked as a research journalist and podcast host at a youth-led and research-driven digital media platform. She worked on stories of Afghanistan, international relations, society and gender, and interviewed key experts from the government, academia, policy, and civil society.
She is currently working at the United States Institute of Peace. She is also a Doha Debates Ambassador.
