Nadia Kamel is an Egyptian film director, producer, and writer. She was born in Cairo in 1961 to a family of journalists active in the cultural and political scene. After studying microbiology and chemistry, she devoted herself to cinema. She worked as an assistant to many renowned directors, including Attiyat El-Abnoudi, Youssef Chahine, and Yousry Nasrallah. She started working on her own projects in the 2000s. Her successful documentary films include An Egyptian Salad (2007), which tells the story of her family and its multiple cultural and religious identities, and Green Mirage (2011), which tackles sustainable development in the Tunisian desert. In 2017, she spent nine months in the Assyut governorate to establish the first independent film school. Kamel has also served as a juror for international film festivals.She further developed the project of telling her family’s history, which began with An Egyptian Salad, in her acclaimed autobiographical novel Born (2018). Born is written entirely in Egyptian Arabic, an unconventional choice in Arabic literature, and cuts across multiple genres. The author focuses on her mother’s multifaceted identity as an Egyptian of Italian Jewish origins. As in her films, Kamel tackles topics that are often taboo and are only partly explored in the Egyptian cultural debate. Kamel is currently working on a hybrid genre film about Egyptian youth in the early eighties.