It is with great enthusiasm and anticipation that we announce an important change here at Meedan: This November, our chief program officer, Dr. Dima Saber, will become our executive director. This will follow the retirement of our dear founder and current CEO, Ed Bice. Although Ed’s impending departure feels bittersweet, we could not be more confident in Dima’s ability to lead Meedan into the future.

Dima will come into this role with more than a decade of experience leading our programmatic work. But her commitment to our mission and the issues that first sparked the ideas behind Meedan goes back much further.

Scholar, activist, and organizational strategist: Meet Dima Saber

Dima wields a unique blend of deep knowledge of the issues that drive us and unflinching operational pragmatism. After writing a dissertation analyzing 70 years’ worth of media coverage of the Arab-Israeli wars, Dima completed her doctorate in media studies in 2011, just as uprisings across the Arab region were reshaping the way that people understood social movements, media, and technology.

“I had spent years researching the Voice of the Arabs radio between 2007 and 2010 in Cairo, so the Egyptian revolution gave me the burst of hope that got me back home to Beirut,” she says. While teaching at the American University of Beirut, she watched as the revolutionary movement in neighboring Syria rose and then met a violent crackdown by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. This brought the real-world importance of Dima’s scholarly work into full relief. She soon began collaborating with filmmakers and technologists who were documenting the conflict in Syria. Dima excelled at finding generative connections across academia, journalism, and technology development.

It was only fitting that Dima began working with Meedan in 2013 on a project aimed at developing tools and resources for journalists and human rights activists in the Arab region, a collaboration with the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research,  where she was also a reader in media studies. Before long, she was leading Meedan’s Check Global project and would soon convert our cohort from just a handful of like-minded organizations in North Africa and Western Asia into a global network of partners spanning more than 45 countries across the Larger World. 

Since 2022, Dima has been the driving force behind much of our most impactful work. As Meedan’s chief program officer, she has overseen our election projects, implemented crisis response efforts, and helped spearhead data-driven projects that help us understand how gender-based violence circulates online. At the same time, she has also built out organizationwide workflows, fundraising methods, and overall strategy. Dima has supercharged Meedan’s capacity, enabling us to grow and increase our impact immeasurably. There is no person better equipped to lead Meedan as we move into the future.

As she steps into this new role come November, we know that Dima will take Meedan to new heights while preserving the one-of-a-kind organizational ethos that Ed has built over the past two decades. We are as lucky to have had Ed leading us as we are to have Dima taking the reins.

To both of them, we say: Thank you!