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We tell impactful stories across multiple media
powerfully, and with integrity.

Accelerating action, based on science_

More About Us
More About Us
Perim: Who We Are
We are a specialist content firm, connecting the Middle East to the world through engaging narratives on culture, environment, health, law, and tech.
Perim Media's clients include multinational companies, government entities, law firms, startups, and non-profits. Our work includes includes crafting inspirational creation stories, path-laying executive speeches, conference design & proceedings, and providing expert legal testimony.

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CONTENT MENU
Our work has appeared in many of the most recognizable international publications, including:
The StoryTelling Process
We are storytellers. How we get from raw material to a finished product varies from client to client and situation to situation.
Discovery

We often start with 360-degree interviews with stakeholders to understand internal and external perceptions of the organization’s vision and purpose.

We then sift through the organization’s past and present for narrative elements that are potentially undervalued -- or not used at all.

Project Design

With powerful narratives in place, we help clients translate their stories to their most effective media -- whether print, social, documentary, podcast, etc.

The most effective storytelling is backed up by compelling evidence. We collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data to identify clients’ most meaningful environmental and social impact, and areas of improvement over time. That information supports ESG-related reporting, and is integrated back into the central narrative.  


We look for discrete projects or achievements that encapsulate an organization’s identity, values, and impact. If suitable ("accessible") projects do not exist, we help create them. We work with the client to define creative and achievable demonstrations of technology, strategy, etc; we bring in value-adding partnerships, and coordinate execution to attract notice from target demographics.


We often start with 360-degree interviews with stakeholders to understand internal and external perceptions of the organization’s vision and purpose.

We then sift through the organization’s past and present for narrative elements that are potentially undervalued -- or not used at all.

Impact Assessment

With powerful narratives in place, we help clients translate their stories to their most effective media -- whether print, social, documentary, podcast, etc.

The most effective storytelling is backed up by compelling evidence. We collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data to identify clients’ most meaningful environmental and social impact, and areas of improvement over time. That information supports ESG-related reporting, and is integrated back into the central narrative.  


We look for discrete projects or achievements that encapsulate an organization’s identity, values, and impact. If suitable ("accessible") projects do not exist, we help create them. We work with the client to define creative and achievable demonstrations of technology, strategy, etc; we bring in value-adding partnerships, and coordinate execution to attract notice from target demographics.


We often start with 360-degree interviews with stakeholders to understand internal and external perceptions of the organization’s vision and purpose.

We then sift through the organization’s past and present for narrative elements that are potentially undervalued -- or not used at all.

Translation to Effective Media

With powerful narratives in place, we help clients translate their stories to their most effective media -- whether print, social, documentary, podcast, etc.

The most effective storytelling is backed up by compelling evidence. We collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data to identify clients’ most meaningful environmental and social impact, and areas of improvement over time. That information supports ESG-related reporting, and is integrated back into the central narrative.  


We look for discrete projects or achievements that encapsulate an organization’s identity, values, and impact. If suitable ("accessible") projects do not exist, we help create them. We work with the client to define creative and achievable demonstrations of technology, strategy, etc; we bring in value-adding partnerships, and coordinate execution to attract notice from target demographics.


We often start with 360-degree interviews with stakeholders to understand internal and external perceptions of the organization’s vision and purpose.

We then sift through the organization’s past and present for narrative elements that are potentially undervalued -- or not used at all.

The StoryTelling Process
We are storytellers. How we get from raw material to a finished product varies from client to client and situation to situation.

Discovery

We typically start with 360-degree interviews of senior officers, employees, and external stakeholders to get a sense of the organization’s vision and purpose, and how it is seen by clients and the public. We sift through the organization’s past and present for undervalued narrative elements. We have found that high-functioning organizations are often so focused on the present, they discount both past accomplishments and the broader environment in which they work.

Project Design

Self-contained projects and public events are valuable tools with which to amplify – and at times, simplify – story arcs.  We look for projects (completed or in-progress) that encapsulate an organization’s identity, values, and impact.  If such “representative” projects do not exist, we look for ways to create them, and then weave them into the story. These are not “dummy projects,” but active demonstrations of broader current or potential impact.

Impact Assessment

We work with our partners to provide quantitative and qualitative measures like polling, focus groups, indices, that highlight clients’ real environmental and social impact – and what drives it. This process yields hard metrics that can be integrated into a variety of existing environmental and social reporting frameworks.

Translation to Effective Media

Once we have established a candidate story arc, signposts and supporting evidence, we help the client translate the story to its most effective media, whether that’s social, documentary shorts, traditional print, exhibitions, films, speeches, podcasts, etc.

portfolio
Our work has been published in –
Storytelling
Speechwriting
Social Media
Copywriting
Film Treatments
Grant Proposals
Corporate and Executive Profiles
Creation Narratives
Conference Content
Expert Testimony
In-house Magazines
Brochures
Books

Meet The Team

We are cutting-edge creatives

Dr. Ethan D. Chorin

Dr. Ethan D. Chorin

Founder & Director

Sherif Dhaimish

Sherif Dhaimish

Director, Creative

Ambassador Dinkar Srivastava

Ambassador Dinkar Srivastava

Director of Energy & Economic Transitions

Aya Burweila

Aya Burweila

Director, Design & Partnerships

Dr. Blair Fowlkes-Childs

Dr. Blair Fowlkes-Childs

Director, Cultural Heritage

Ambassador Lange Schermerhorn

Ambassador Lange Schermerhorn

Director, Government Affairs

Dr. Cole Bunzel

Dr. Cole Bunzel

Sr. Associate, Legal Practice

R'riyon Draine

R'riyon Draine

Summer Associate

Eric Ellman

Eric Ellman

Director, Science & Climate Media

Michael Brill, Ph.D. Cand.

Michael Brill, Ph.D. Cand.

Director, Middle East Research

Dr. Sercan Canbolat

Dr. Sercan Canbolat

Director, Middle East and Turkish Affairs

Dr. Aaron Rock-Singer

Dr. Aaron Rock-Singer

Director, Legal Affairs

Col. Wolfgang Pusztai

Col. Wolfgang Pusztai

Director, Geopolitical Risk & Strategy

Omar A. Benhalim

Omar A. Benhalim

Director, Legal + Business Logistics

Partners

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Dr. Ethan D. Chorin

Founder & Director

Ethan has more than 25 years’ experience working across the Middle East and Africa, as a senior communications professional and policy advisor, a US diplomat, and a communications and government affairs executive with Shell Oil, Dubai Ports World, BRG and the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Chorin is the author of four books, including Benghazi!: A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink (Hachette, 2022), Exit the Colonel (PublicAffairs, 2012), and Translating Libya: In Search of the Libyan Short Story (Darf, 2015). Chorin has published more than 70 articles and Op-Eds for the New York Times, The Financial Times, Salon, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Prospect and Foreign Policy, and academic journals, and has been a regular contributor to Forbes and BBC Radio 4.  He has been a Fulbright (Jordan) and Fulbright-Hays (Yemen) Fellow, a Social Venture Fellow at the Yale School of Management (SOM) and Jean Monnet Fellow at l’X. Chorin holds a PhD in Agriculture & Resource Economics from UC Berkeley, an MA in International Policy from Stanford University, and a BA in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from Yale University. He speaks Arabic, French, Farsi, and basic Japanese.

He posts to Substack, X and Instagram @ethanchorin.  

‍www.ethanchorinauthor.com

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Sherif Dhaimish

Director, Creative

Sherif is a professional editor, arts curator and the founder Pendle Press, a cultural preservation project established in 2021. He collaborates with publishers including CentreCentre, Scala, Kulturalis, Medina, and Darf Publishers, for which he edited and helped launch a range of publications. He has directed arts projects including a museum exhibition honoring the work of his father, well known Libyan satirist Hasan Dhaimish “Al Satoor” and a forthcoming multimedia production (2024) about the late Lancastrian filmmaker, Sam Hanna, funded by Lottery Heritage Fund. He holds a BA in Communication Studies from the University of Leeds and an MA in Critical Theory from King's College London.

Follow him on Instagram @sherif_dhaimish.

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Ambassador Dinkar Srivastava

Director of Energy & Economic Transitions


D. P. Srivastava was a member of the senior Indian civil service, retiring as Ambassador to Iran (2011-2015), in which role he negotiated the MOU for Indian investment in the port of Chabahar. He also served as Ambassador to Libya and The Czech Republic, and was India’s High Commissioner to Malta. Ambassador Srivastava has represented India in Washington, Brussels, and at the United Nations, including as member of Indian delegations to the World Conference on Human Rights and the International Court of Justice.

He has extensive diplomatic and commercial experience in the oil and gas sector, and coordinated the VIF Task Force on ‘India’s Energy Transition in a Carbon-Constrained World’. Post-government service, Srivastava has served as Independent Director for the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL), India’s largest government gas company, and has been on the Board of Directors of India Ports Global Ltd (IPGL), and a Senior Advisor (2015-2016) to ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Indian Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), India’s national oil company.

Srivastava is concurrently a Distinguished Fellow at the Vivekananda International Foundation, and is author of ‘Forgotten Kashmir: The Other Side of the Line of Control’ (Harper Collins). He speaks Hindi, Arabic, French, and Farsi.

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Aya Burweila

Director, Design & Partnerships

Originally from Benghazi, Libya, Aya is an Athens-based TV commentator, author, business consultant, currently serving as Ambassador and Special Envoy of the European Public Law Organization to Libya and North Africa.  Ms. Burweila is frequently consulted for her views on Middle East politics, security, and refugee policy.  In 2018 she founded Code on the Road, a non-profit providing business and coding skills to young women and girls across the Mediterranean and the Middle East.  COR was a winner of the Harvard Arab Alumni Association’s ‘Arabi Impact Initiative in 2019, and a recipient of a grant from the U.S. State Department’s Innovation Fund.  She is the author of the European Union-commissioned Greece National Report on Migrants and Entrepreneurship (2018). Burweila is an alumna of the US State Department’s prestigious International Visitor’s Leadership Program (IVLP) and was an adviser to the Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence at the University of Athens. She holds a MA from La Verne University (Athens), and a BA from the University of Indianapolis (Athens) in International Relations. She speaks Arabic, English and Greek.

Dr. Blair Fowlkes-Childs

Director, Cultural Heritage

Blair Fowlkes Childs is a specialist in Roman art, archaeology and religion with extensive curatorial, editorial, and university teaching experience. At the Katonah Museum of Art, she curated the exhibition Stories of Syria's Textiles: Artand Heritage across Two Millennia (October 15, 2023 - January 28, 2024),supported by grants from the Barakat Trust, the Coby Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The exhibition catalogue was co-published by the KMA and Scala Arts and Heritage Publishers. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was co-curator of the award-winning 2019 international loan exhibition The World Between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East and co-authorof the catalogue.

Support for her current book project on Syrian and Phoenician sanctuaries in imperial Rome includes a fellowship at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where she was also guest curator of the 2022 exhibition “Photographs from Dura-Europos: 1922-2022 and Onward” organized for the Yale-French Excavations’ centennial. She has taught at universities in the U.K. and U.S. including Royal Holloway, University of London, Columbia, Yale and New York Universities. Fowlkes Childs received a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from theInstitute of Fine Arts at New York University in classical art and archaeology with a minor in Islamic art and architecture. She speaks French and Italian.

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Ambassador Lange Schermerhorn

Director, Government Affairs

Lange Schermerhorn was sworn in as Ambassador to the Republic of Djibouti on December 11, 1997 and presented her credentials on January 25, 1998. She joined the Foreign Service in 1966, and is a member of the Senior Foreign Service. She has served in a variety of economic, political, trade promotion, management, and staff positions in Washington, Southeast Asia, the Near East and South Asia, and Europe.

From 1993 to 1997, Ambassador Schermerhorn served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. Prior to that assignment, she was the Deputy Director of the Office of Career Development and Assignments. From 1988-1990, she served in the office of Special Trade Activities, Bureau of Economic Affairs, and was Counselor for Economic Affairs in the U.S. Embassy in Brussels from 1985 to 1988.

Ambassador Schermerhorn's other assignments include Deputy Director, Office of North African Affairs (1982-1985); Assistant Commercial Attache in London (1978-1981); and Economic Officer in Tehran (1974-1977). From 1971 to 1973, she was assigned to the Department of State's Secretariat, first in the Operations Center and subsequently as a staff officer on the Secretariat staff. Earlier overseas assignments include Saigon from 1969 to 1970 and Colombo from 1967 to 1968.

Ambassador Schermerhorn received her bachelor's degree in history and international relations from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is a 1982 graduate of the National War College, National Defense University in Fort McNair, Washington; and she obtained a certificate in Economics from the Foreign Service Institute in 1974.

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Dr. Cole Bunzel

Sr. Associate, Legal Practice

Cole M. Bunzel is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian and scholar of the modern Middle East, he specializes in the history and contemporary affairs of the Arabian Peninsula, Islamic theology and law, and modern Islamic radicalism. Bunzel earned both his B.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, as well as an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has been a fellow at Yale Law School’s Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization and is the editor of the website www.jihadica.com.

R'riyon Draine

Summer Associate

R'riyon Draine is a rising senior at Cornell University, where she is pre-law, majoring in government and a research assistant to a Title IX lab analyzing sexual discrimination trends at 4-year colleges. She sits on several academic panels at Cornell, including the Hearing & Review Panel, the Academic Integrity Hearing Board, and the Dean's Student Advisory Council. She is the Chicago representative on the Scholars’ Advisory Council to the president of the Posse Foundation. R’riyon is one of the founders of SoulAAn Nation, which supports Cornell’s African-American student body. She is also a peer mentor for B.O.S.S., aiding college transitions for self-identified women of color. Outside of Cornell, she has been a summer consultant intern with Bloomberg Associates, and an intern with the Chicago Urban League and the Art Institute of Chicago. She is proficient in American Sign Language (ASL).

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Eric Ellman

Director, Science & Climate Media

For more than 25 years, Ellman has helped communities in the US, Mexico, the UK, and East Africa communicate their environmental needs, while creating innovative, multi-party solutions to those needs. He helped hundreds of Rio Grande residents build first-time water and sewer infrastructure, developed a program to treat and reuse effluent for alternative crops; supported a prison-based retraining program in Sonora, Mexico, and organized binational canoe and kayak races on the Rio Grande. In 2021, he launched a U.S. State Department-funded initiative to use London’s canals and canal boats as a venue for entertainers to build awareness of climate change. His work has been covered in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and on NPR. As Communications Director for the Yale University Climate and Energy Institute (2013-2016) he managed press conferences, community outreach, domestic and international partnerships, edited Center publications, and helped assemble Yale’s climate delegation to the 2015 Perim-ERO Summit in Djibouti.  Eric speaks English and Spanish.

Michael Brill, Ph.D. Cand.

Director, Middle East Research

Michael Brill is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, and a fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Princeton Center for Culture, Society and Religion. During the 2022-2023 academic year, he was a fellow with the Cold War Archives Research Institute at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. Brill’s research has focused on Iraq between 1968 and 2003. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Middle East Journal, War on the Rocks, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, Caravan Notebook. He holds an M.A. in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Affairs, and a B.A. in History and Political Science from Westfield State University. He speaks Arabic.

Dr. Sercan Canbolat

Director, Middle East and Turkish Affairs

Dr. Sercan Canbolat is currently the inaugural director of Abrahamic Programs at University of Connecticut (UConn) and a postdoctoral lecturer in UConn’s Department of Political Science. Sercan’s research areas include political psychology, elite decision-making processes, leadership profiling, as well as political and legal systems in Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with an emphasis on the Arab World and Turkey.

His book (co-authored with Dr. Özgür Özdamar), Leaders in the Middle East and North Africa: How Ideology Shapes Foreign Policy, received the International Studies Association's 2023 Best Book Award. Sercan received the ISA-Midwest Region’s 2020 Margaret G. Hermann Award two separate years for his papers, "Understanding Extreme Islamists in Their Native Language" and "Deciphering Political Islamists’ Rhetoric in Their Native Language: A Turkish Operational Code Analysis Approach.”

A Fulbright alumnus, Dr. Canbolat earned an MA degree in International Relations from Bilkent University in 2014, and PhD from the University of Connecticut in 2023.

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Dr. Aaron Rock-Singer

Director, Legal Affairs

Dr. Rock-Singer is a Middle East historian and expert on Islamic law, Islamism and Arabic media. He is the coordinator for a team of five Perim testifying experts that has worked on matters related to sovereignty, cross border disputes, Islamic law, Middle East-related commercial law, customary law, public defense, immigration and asylum, terrorism, and force majeure & nationalization-related damages.

He is the author of two books: Practicing Islam: Print Media and Islamic Revival (Cambridge, 2019) and In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the 20th-Century Middle East (University of California Press, 2022) as well as several academic articles.

Aaron holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, an M.Phil. from St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, and B.A from the University of Pennsylvania. Aaron has taught at Princeton, Cornell and the University of Wisconsin -Madison and is currently a Fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government's Middle East Initiative. Aaron has worked as an advisor to law firms on Middle East-related cases. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew, and reads Turkish.

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Col. Wolfgang Pusztai

Director, Geopolitical Risk & Strategy

Col Pusztai is a regional Middle East/ Africa strategy and security analyst. He has held senior positions within the Austrian Ministry of Defense-General Staff and been part of Austrian delegations to the European Union and NATO.  From 2007-2012, Pusztai was Austria's Defense Attaché to Italy, Greece, Tunisia, and Libya (as well as liaison officer to the Italian Joint Operations Headquarters) in which capacity he managed aspects of Austria’s response to the Arab Spring, including the evacuation of 100s of Austrian and EU citizens from Libya at the beginning of the 2011 Revolution. He has advised senior politicians, governments, multinational institutions, and corporations, and lectured and written extensively about military strategy North Africa, Islamic radicalism, and migration. Pusztai is Chairman of the Advisory Board of the National Council on U.S.-Libya Relations (NCUSLR) and Senior Advisor at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES). He holds a MA in Political Science from the University of Vienna and a MS in National Security Strategy from the prestigious National War College in Washington D.C.

Omar A. Benhalim

Director, Legal + Business Logistics

Benhalim has managed large-scale procurement and facilities management for medical research facilities, data centers and network operations centers. He started his career in the 1970s as principal in the Arab Trading and Contracting Company (ATCC), the exclusive Libya Distributor for many global brands such as Boeing, General Motors, Honda, General Electric and Toshiba. He successfully managed many major infrastructure and supply projects, including the total fit-out of 32 47-bed hospitals, the installation of water and sewer treatment plants in Tripoli and Misurata, and upgrades to the Libya national electrical power grid. Omar was Co-Founder of Avicenna. Benhalim is fluent in Arabic and English with a working knowledge of Italian.