Salma Abdo is a filmmaker, media producer, and PR specialist based in Cologne, Germany, with roots in Damascus. Since beginning on Syrian film sets in 2006, Salma has built a cross-border career spanning Syria, the UAE, Jordan, Turkey, and Germany — working across film, audio, design, and storytelling formats.
Their work focuses on creating inclusive media that amplifies marginalized voices, promotes LGBTQI+ safer spaces, and supports pro-democracy, anti-racist narratives. With expertise in post-production, sound design, and conceptual media development, Salma brings together artistic precision and political clarity to craft narratives that reflect complexity, resilience, and collective imagination.
Drawing from lived experiences of xenophobia and displacement, Salma’s media practice serves as both creative expression and social intervention. Their projects emphasize empowerment, participatory placemaking, and diverse representation, aiming to shift dominant narratives and contribute to long-term cultural change.
Rooted in abolitionist, feminist, and anti-colonial values, Salma approaches storytelling as a political act — a tool to reclaim memory, challenge injustice, and build transformative futures. In recent years, they have played an active role in Germany’s pro-democracy media landscape, supporting campaigns and platforms that center community-led change.
As part of the Cologne-based collective In-Haus e.V., Salma continues to develop and support media strategies that bridge art, activism, and healing.
–
Salma’s personal interests lie at the crossroads of trauma, spirituality, and collective transformation. With a background shaped by a religious, conservative and traditional upbringing during their teenage years, Salma brings a unique lens to questions of sacred memory, emotional life, and political imagination. This grounding continues to inform a deep engagement with themes of calling, rupture, healing, and liberation.
Their creative and intellectual work explores how personal and collective histories of trauma shape the way communities navigate identity, justice, and connection. Drawing on abolitionist, anti-colonial, and feminist frameworks, Salma examines the psychological dimensions of resistance — especially in the lives of queer and BIPOC visionaries who carry both ancestral grief and the courage to imagine beyond dominant systems.
Influenced by decolonial theology, somatic healing, and Black radical thought, Salma approaches scholarship and media-making as spiritual and political practices. Their work bridges inner and outer worlds, treating theory as a space for tenderness, disruption, and renewal.
Whether through writing, filmmaking, or community-based media projects, Salma remains committed to storytelling as a practice of cultural reimagining and worldbuilding.