Assiya Majgan Amini is an artist, filmmaker and the co-founder of Afghan Academy International. She has initiated a range of interactive projects and platforms designed to promote peace, education, culture, arts and community cohesion. As the founder and curator of the annual Afghan International Peace Conference and Festival, Assiya has established a multi-media platform and discourse, the content of which is accessible and archived online. She hopes to pay tribute to the victims of the war and applaud the resilience of those who have not lost hope with the physical construction of the first Afghan Library and Peace Centre in London.

She is also involved in other projects and recently has won a free residency for her community where she has set up a cultural hub and art gallery with an attached Afghan library.

Her doctoral work include a thesis and film:

​Afghanistan has experienced ongoing conflict since the 1970s. Its people have been internally displaced or forced to seek refuge externally, living with acute mental pressure and accumulating repressed traumas in hostile environments which are frequently unarticulated. I explore these lost and missing narratives and emotional experiences with a particular focus on those of elderly Afghans in London, aiming to capture and preserve their reflections and establish intergenerational and cultural links. Using my background as an Afghan woman, artist, and film-maker, and my insight into the Afghan community in London, I employ oral history and sensual and auto-ethnographic approaches. Because films can effectively depict identity construction in the face of adversity, I used first-person filmed material based on what I term ‘Sixth Cinema' as a new form to articulate and represent their lost and missing narratives. Adopting a new form of hybrid text that switches between an academic tone and a more personal register has enabled me to connect directly to the practice- led nature of the project. I found that elderly Afghans are long-term survivors whose testimonies yield vital information about overcoming hardships and providing essential knowledge about how different ethnic groups used to integrate and cohabit in the past. It highlights their views of Afghanistan and their ability to function in their contemporary lives, as, against the backdrop of ongoing conflict, the need to engage them becomes increasingly important. My study represents, honours, and dignifies the Afghan collective providing qualitatively nuanced responses that have been missing from our understanding of these displaced people, what they still remember of their lives and how they process their traumas. It is crucial to safeguard and connect their stories, as they bear witness to a culture that once flourished and is now on the cusp of being forgotten completely.

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