Sepia portrait of a woman wearing silver head and nose jewellery

Team and partners

The producers and core team behind Returning Sands, the organisations supporting the work, and how to reach us.

The team

Where possible we work with friends pro bono, so that heritage workers and contributors are paid for their time.

Paris Quetzal Sistilli
Producer · Co-Founder
A Mexican-American cultural heritage researcher focused on heritage protection, cultural policy, and collective memory. Degrees from Sciences Po and Columbia. Published in the Journal of Art Crime and art-law journals at UC Berkeley and Harvard.
New York
Yusef Bushara
Producer · Co-Founder
A Sudanese-Bermudian editor, writer and researcher specialising in global literatures and publishing. Based in London, he is a non-fiction editorial assistant at Jacaranda Books, and in 2025 he released his debut poetry collection, Good News. Yusef studied Middle Eastern politics at Sciences Po, earned an MA in English Literature from the University of Hong Kong, and holds a master’s in Comparative Literature from SOAS University of London.
London
Camilla Marchese González
Producer · Co-Founder
A Guatemalan-Italian writer and filmmaker drawn to global storytelling. She studied English and Film at Barnard College and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. She co-produced the documentary Si La Isla Quiere (Island Willing), and the short films she has written and produced have screened at DOC NYC, Hamptons International Film Festival, Woodstock Film Festival, Hawaiʻi International Film Festival and Athena Film Festival. She grew up in Antigua Guatemala and is now based in Brooklyn.
New York
Basma Khalifa
Executive Producer
A Sudanese creative and founder of Zola Studios, making character-driven stories that centre underrepresented voices. Her debut feature reached over 10 million viewers and earned a Newcomer of the Year nomination at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
London
Aicha Cherif
Director · Writer
A New York-based director drawn to storytelling as a means of excavation, and to the emotional architectures that shape how we belong to one another. Her documentary HEAT screened in Film Forum’s Tenement Stories retrospective, where she was the youngest director. She is a 2026 Sundance x Adobe Ignite Fellow.
New York