The Middle East Modernities Project (MEMP) is an umbrella for a series of activities that aim to unearth, conserve, and make available for discussion and debate aspects of the Middle East's modern history. The key components of the project are new iterations of Bidoun's signature curatorial initiative, the Bidoun Library Project, along with a special thematic issue of the magazine focusing on rapid state formation in the Gulf region in the 1960s and 1970s.

Negar Azimi is senior editor of Bidoun. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Harper's, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She has written catalogue texts about artists Yto Barrada, Paul Chan, Shirana Shahbazi, Lawrence Weiner, and Andro Wekua among many others. She studied politics at Stanford and Harvard, and is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at Columbia University. She is on the board of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation and Artists Space in New York City.

Michael C. Vazquez is senior editor of Bidoun. Before Bidoun he was the editor of Transition: An International Review. He is a nonresident fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard.

Babak Radboy is creative director of Bidoun. He is also a freelance art director, produces music, and attends to an eccentric archive of printed matter. His work can be viewed at babakradboy.com.

Tiffany Malakooti is director of special projects at Bidoun. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts. She runs a blog about Iranian artifacts called Belog and curates Bidoun's UbuWeb archive.

Bidoun Magazine was founded in 2004 to fill a gaping hole in the arts and culture coverage of the Middle East. Since that time, Bidoun has evolved into a publishing, educational, and curatorial initiative dedicated to introducing new ideas and images from the Middle East.