Yazan Kopty is a writer, oral historian, and [<u>National Geographic Explorer</u>](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/find-explorers/yazan-kopty) based in Washington D.C. His work focuses on acts of listening and narrating. He is interested in community-sourced history as well as the notion of memory as resistance. He is currently the lead investigator of [<u>Imagining the Holy</u>](https://creativemornings.com/talks/yazan-kopty), a research project that seeks to examine and connect thousands of images of historic Palestine from the National Geographic Society archive with Palestinian community elders, cultural heritage experts, and field researchers in order to add new layers of indigenous knowledge to the images.