New Yorked-based artist Meriem Bennani grew up in Morocco, earned an MFA from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and a BFA from Cooper Union in New York. Bennani and artist Hayden Dunham are the co-founders of Other Travel, a collaborative curatorial project involving the creation and delivery of extra-terrestrial gifts to seven artists in the New York area. She is also one half of Some Silly Stories, a series of hand-animated perversions based on her own crude drawings and a constant dialog with musician Flavien Berger. Meriem is currently working on videos and photographs documenting the life of Fardaous Funjab, the avant-garde Moroccan Hijab designer. The project explores the encounter of fashion and religion with a focus on the aesthetics of sexuality in a contemporary Muslim context. Bennani is interested in dissolving tropes and questioning systems of representation through a strategy of magical realism and humor as an unreliable pacifier. Part of the graduate painting seminar at Boston University, the Tuesday Night MFA Lecture series brings practicing artists to campus to present their work. All lectures are free and open to the public.