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Timeline
Current projects
Past projects
Ex libris palaestina
Yazan Kopty is a writer, researcher, and community archivist. His work explores the relationship between narrative and power and advocates for storytelling grounded in self-representation and community collaboration. Shaped by his background as an oral historian, his practice aims to gather polyphony of voices and transform memory into a force for resistance, reckoning, and reconciliation.
Since 2018, Yazan has been a National Geographic Explorer and lead investigator of Imagining the Holy, a community-based archive project indigenizing historic photographs of Palestinians and their homeland and activating them as sites of gathering, reconnection, and new cultural production.
Beginning in October 2025, Yazan will be producer and host of This is Not a Watermelon, Afikra’s podcast series reframing Palestine through conversations with experts and practitioners working to preserve its past, document its present, and imagine better futures for the land and its people.
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Follow Imagining the Holy
This is Not a Watermelon
Miocene Tectonic formation of the Dead Sea Rift
6000 BCE Domestication of the olive tree in the Eastern Mediterranean
303 Martyrdom of Al Khader the dragon slayer
1917 First family exile in living memory, a death march from Nablus to Urfa near the end of WWI
1927Jericho earthquake strikes with a magnitude of 6.3 destroying my great-grandfather’s house in the village of Rafidia
1948 Our catastrophe is named the Nakba; second family exile in living memory with the ethnic cleansing of Haifa
1967 Nakba continues as naksa
1969 Third family exile in living memory from Amman to Boulder, Colorado
1984 I’m born on the boundary between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, on the coldest day of the year
1992 I write and illustrate my first book (about wolves) to widespread critical acclaim
1993I watch the Oslo Accords being signed on TV and find out that I am a Palestinian
2006I visit geographical Palestine for the first time
2021I ask myself again, “Why is being Palestinian such an absurd experience?”
2023 Nakba continues as genocide
(In progress)
In many ways, Palestinians have been doomed to the fate of the eternal antagonist: always part of the story, but never the hero, and never the storyteller. In this work, I flip this paradigm around and use absurdity as a lens to examine how we have been ignored, overpowered, and erased, and—more importantly—how we have continued to resist, to grow in solidarity with one another, and to redefine what it means to be strong and what it means to be free.
Crayon, glue, real watermelon seeds on paper
Author’s collection
(2016 - ongoing)
In 2018, I became National Geographic’s first archive-based Explorer and was given access to the tens of thousands of photographs of Palestine and Palestinians held in the magazine’s archive, most of which have never been published and only seen by a handful of people.
Missing in this priceless trove of photographs and their captions were the names, voices, and perspectives of the Palestinian subjects who were photographed, as well as a myriad of details captured visually but left unmentioned or unnoticed by the photographers and editors who captured and catalogued the collection. In close collaboration with the archive team, I developed a process and methodology to connect these images with the communities that they came from in order to add missing layers of indigenous memory, knowledge, and narrative to them, while giving access to as many descendants of these photographs as possible.
Through a variety of digital and analogue gatherings, I connected the collection to thousands of Palestinians at home and across the diaspora from community elders and family members of those photographed, to cultural heritage experts and field researchers, as well as a huge and enthusiastic online community who access the collection through the project’s Instagram page and continue to add their own information and use the photographs to fuel their own creative, academic, and personal efforts.
As a true community-based archive, the project continues to grow and evolve, serving as a model for indigenizing other Palestine collections beyond National Geographic, as well as for other indigenous, marginalized, or silenced communities whose images have been captured in photographs but whose voices are still missing.
My work was featured in the June 2023 issue of National Geographic Magazine and you can watch my presentation about The Voice of the Subject for Creative Mornings D.C. here.
(In progress)
This research project aims to chronicle the long history of donkeys as our most cherished collaborators and companions and to serve as a petition to elevate the donkey to its rightful place.
(2021)
Curated exhibition at Gulf Photo Plus for Reel Palestine Film Festival featuring archival photographs from the Matson Collection and my video conversations with filmmakers Dima Srouji (Sebastia), Vivien Sansour (Cistern), and Milena Desse (The Sun & The Looking Glass).
(2021)
Download my chapter here.
(2019)
Installation about statelessness and refugee photography for the Arab Image Foundation’s exhibition ON THE POTENTIAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY / THE 0069FA COLLECTION: AN ARCHIVE AT WORK at Les Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles 2019.
Download a digital version of the installation here and access the accompanying captions here.
(2019)
Essay about conjuring ghosts from photographic archives for Journal Safar Issue #4 Nostalgia, featuring hand-colored photographs by the American Colony Photographers of Jerusalem.
Download a PDF in English and Arabic here.
Quick links to specific folders:
Cartography
Photography
Oral History
Data Visualization
Various