Arlene is an acclaimed veteran multimedia journalist, photographer, and documentary filmmaker whose extensive body of work focuses deeply on overlooked and everyday human stories. The scholar's Fulbright project in Greece Keeping the Faith: Meet the Romaniotes of Ioannina combines photographic portraits with oral history of the last remaining Romaniotes of Ioannina. Only 28 Romaniotes Jews remain in a city of close to 65,000 and in a municipality of almost 114,000. This project aims to document the lives of surviving members of the Romaniote community at home, at work, at the synagogue, and in interviews as part of an extensive oral history project.   

Keeping the Faith is a documentary and archival project focused on exploring and preserving the history of Romaniote Jews in Ioannina, Romaniotes are the oldest continuous Jewish community in Europe going back 2,300 years. Unlike Hebrew and Yiddish speaking Jews, Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe and Ladino speaking Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, the Greek speaking Romaniotes trace their roots back to Hellenistic and Roman eras.  Arlene will pursue this project in collaboration with the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina.