08/11/2026
📸 Laylit & our co-founder .maghzal through 's lens 🫶 originally captured for
🎉 see you all sept 12 at our NYC 8-year anniversary (and 150th party) or at an upcoming party in Montreal, Detroit, Ottawa and Bahrain
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Dean Majd is a self-taught, lens-based artist born and based in Queens, New York. Born to Palestinian immigrants, he studied international relations with a focus on the Middle East at CUNY The City College of New York. Majd began forming his intimate visual language after being given his first camera at 7y old by his mother. His diaristic work engages with violence as an imposed center-point of one’s life, focusing on repressed, negative emotions within contemporary masculinity in relation to addiction and self-destruction. His work also explores the complexities of the Arab-American dichotomy and the Palestinian diaspora against apartheid, and how they overlap.
Majd has been profiled by Aperture, MATTE Magazine, AnOther Magazine, and GQ Middle East. His editorial work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, The New Yorker, Dazed, and New York Magazine among others. He recently has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in the exhibition New York Now: Home, and lectured at the International Center of Photography. In fall 2025 he will be an artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and he is one of the recipients of the 2025 En Foco Fellowship Award. He is passionate about cinema, immensely devoted to his friends, and a proud New Yorker. He believes that love, above all else, is the driving force behind everything he does.
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Nadim Maghzal is a co-founder of Laylit and member of Lebanese-Canadian duo Wake Island. As a producer, musician and DJ, he is passionate about rhythm, range and dynamics across a wide variety of genres and draws from this passion to create energetic and electrifying dance sets. Inspired by his upbringing in Beirut and his life in Montreal & NYC, Nadim’s music sets out to explore new ways of blending together very divergent musical vocabularies and ideas, resulting in a unique hybrid sound that reinvents the place of Arabic music on the modern dancefloor.
