Roaa Ali is Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries focusing on race and diversity within the cultural sector. As a Cultural Sociologist, Roaa's interdisciplinary research explores race, creative and cultural industries (CCIs), access inequality, and the politics surrounding marginalised cultural production. Passionate about issues of racial and social justice, Roaa explores how culture influences social change and the production of race within cultural contexts and organisations.

Roaa is currently engaged in three research projects. The first project is examining positive action measures within CCIs, aiming to map the scope and implementation of these initiatives. The second project entails the development of a cultural mapping tool for arts service organisations catering to marginalised communities, particularly those from the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) regions (funded by the Wallace Foundation). In the third project, Roaa explores the experiences of Arab Americans as an ethnic minority in post-9/11 America, focusing on their representation in American socio-political and cultural spheres and their significant yet often precarious cultural contributions. This research will be disseminated through a forthcoming monograph titled The Cultural Production of Otherness: Contemporary Arab American Drama (to be published by Routledge in 2024) and a co-edited volume titled Arab, Politics, and Performance (to be published by Routledge in 2023).

Previously, Roaa served as a lecturer in Cultural Sociology at Birmingham City University , and worked as researcher at the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE), University of Manchester. Her research at CoDE explored racial and ethnic inequality in the Creative and Cultural Industries at the intersection of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Movement (in collaboration with Creative Access). In 2022, she was a researcher on the ‘Theatre after Covid’ project, a comparative study at the Royal School of Speech and Drama and LMU Munich to explore Covid-related structural crises on the theatre industry and the impact of Covid on diversity strategies in CCIs.

Roaa has a PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts from the University of Birmingham and her thesis explored Arab American and ethnic minority art production within the American cultural and creative industries. She writes extensively on issues of inequality, anti-racism, and the politics of cultural production in the creative industries. She is an Advisory Council member of Chicago's Polycultural Institute. She is Peer Review College Member for the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Roaa also serves on the editorial board of the IPED (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Equality and Diversity) journal, and was a guest editor for the Open Access ‘Intersections, Institutions and Inequities: Axes of Oppression in the Cultural Sector’ special issue.

She regularly speaks at national and international conferences. She is a co-founder of the ASTR ‘Transnational Committee’, a member of BSA, IFTR, and TaPRA.

PhD (Arab American Drama post 9/11: Cultural Discourses of an Othered Identity), University of Birmingham, 2015

MA (Cultural Studies), University of Birmingham, 2010

PGDip (English Literary Studies), Damascus University, 2007

BA (Hons) English Language and Literature, Damascus University, 2005