Speaker Bios
Mashael Al Hejazi
Mashael Al Hejazi is a Qatari photographer, living in Doha. Her passion for photography was ignited when she acquired her first Polaroid and Kodak 110 cameras. She is developing her personal style and searching for authenticity in the digital world, looking at how the past is reflected in the technology of the future. During her artist residency at Fire Station in Doha, and for her commissioned installation Contemporary Heritage: My Mother Lulwa’s House at a restored Al Najada district home, Mashael has been working with local photographers and projects to capture memories of Doha neighbourhoods for the next generation. Her project Tawtheeq focuses on the people and architecture of old Doha, capturing the rapidly changing daily life in the city. She is using her research into alternative photographic processes as the basis of the project, employing 19th century printing techniques such as Cyanotype and Gum Bichromate printing.
Shaha Al Khulaifi
Shaha Al Khulaifi’s work captures the essence of architecture and the ever-shifting landscape through photography. Her work observes and records the complex environment in which we live, the impact of rapid urban growth and the contemporary experience of the people living in a developing city. Shaha’s photographs are printed and layered using different materials and textures such as glass and mirrors to form a third dimension portraying the evolution of a city that is expanding and taking new forms.
Rahaab Allana
Rahaab Allana is Curator/Publisher, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi; Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (London) and was previously, Honorary Research Associate at the University College, London (Department of Visual Anthropology). He has curated, contributed to and edited several publications and exhibitions on South Asian photography and its trans-national histories. He serves, and has served on the Advisory Committee/Juries of various cultural fora including the Prix Pictet Award (London/Switzerland/Paris); the Gabriele Basilico Prize in Architecture and Landscape Photography; as well as the Editorial Board of the Trans-Asia Photography (TAP) Review, University of Michigan. He is the Founding/Managing Editor of PIX; Founder of the first app for photography from South Asia called ASAP Connect; and is Guest Editor for the next issue of Aperture Magazine (NY) due in the summer 2021.
Maha Khalfan Al Maslamani
Maha Khalfan Al Maslamani is Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar’s Learning and Outreach Coordinator.
Hayat Ahmed Yahya Alsharif
Yemeni-based photojournalist Hayat Ahmed Yahya Alsharif shares human-scaled stories of women’s lives in Yemen. She is a recipient of Tasweer’s 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award, granted to support her aims to share close encounters with Yemeni women and their struggle to survive and provide for their families in such extreme conditions of famine, war and a pandemic.
Shaima Al Tamimi
Through photography, film and writing, Yemeni-Kenyan artist Shaima Al-Tamimi tells deeply personal and resonant stories of experience, relationality, and memory. Al-Tamimi has created two “chapters” of a long term project – As If We Never Came, which is a photographic exploration delving into her ancestral history; and Don’t Get Too Comfortable, a recently completed photo-narrative video framed as a letter to her paternal grandfather. Shaima is currently developing the third 'chapter' that consolidates her family’s archives using immersive Augmented Reality technologies.
Maryam Hassan Al-Thani
Maryam Hassan Al-Thani has worked on a multitude of curatorial projects for Qatar Museums, and is the instigator and curator of Tasweer’s Contemporary Heritage Project, including three commissioned installations by artists Hadeer Omar, Shaha Al Khulaifi and Mashael Al Hejazi at three of Qatar’s heritage sites. Maryam has previously worked on the photographic aspect of Qatar Contemporary: Art and Photography presented in Russia (2018), and has also served as the curator of the exhibition Cultural Exposures: Photography and Film from Qatar in Berlin (2017). She has also curated the exhibition Fragments: An Exhibition by Mahmoud Obaidi (2016) while working for Qatar Museums and has previously commissioned international artists for the National Museum of Qatar. Her work on public art commissions include Richard Serra: East-West; KAWS: Small Lie; Jean Michel-Othoniel: Cosmos; and Simone Fattal: Gates of the Sea.
Shaima Ayoub
Shaima Ayoub is a photographer, image-maker and researcher from London, currently living and working in Doha. Holding a BA in Fashion Communication from Middlesex University, with a focus on image-making, Shaima then went on to receive her MA in Museum and Gallery Practice from UCL. Along with graphic designer Sara Alafifi, she has curated the publication celebrating Tasweer’s inaugural Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Awards and is a member of the photo collective Photo Art Qatar.
Patricia Azevedo
Born in Recife, Brazil, Patricia Azevedo graduated in Philosophy at Université Paris VIII, has a Master’s degree in Philosophy and PhD in Visual Arts both at University Federal of Minas Gerais, where she is Professor in the Visual Arts Course and Director of Photography and Cinema Department. As an artist, she develops collaborative projects, investigating language, territory and power, working in the public space and internet platforms through relationships established between people and the communicative act. She is included in exhibitions, publications and residences in Brazil and abroad. She composes the curatorship team of FIF BH – International Photography Festival of Belo Horizonte, Brazil and is member of the Steering Committee of Fast Forward Women in Photography.
Samar Sayed Baiomy
Samar Sayed Baiomy is an Egyptian photographer and academic. Her ongoing Revive Memories project combines her photography, archival material, oral histories, and academic research to create a deep analysis of the rapid destruction of a historic fishing village in Alexandria, Egypt. Baiomy is a recipient of the Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant, supporting her continued use of her photography to document the complete erasure of this seafront village and capture the memories and experiences of its former residents.
Julie Boukobza
Julie Boukobza is a curator based in Paris and Arles, head of the Luma Arles Residency Program. In 2016, she curated the exhibitionPure Fiction at Marian Goodman gallery and a solo show of Peter Shire at New Galerie, both in Paris. In July 2017, she co-curated with Simon Castets a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade called FADE IN 2 EXT. MODERNIST HOME. She ran an artist-run space in Paris with the curator Stéphanie Moisdon and the artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy in 2018/2019. In January 2020, she curated the solo exhibition The End of the British artist Michael Dean at Converso in Milan. In 2021, she will curate two group exhibitions, one at Brausnfelder Family Collection in Cologne in September and another one at the Virginia Commonwealth University’s gallery in Qatar. In 2022, she will co-curate an exhibition with Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga at CA2M in Madrid.
Susan Collins
Susan Collins works in response to specific sites and situations often employing transmission, networking and time as primary materials. Key works include the BAFTA nominated Tate in Space, commissioned for Tate Online (2002); Underglow (2005-6), a network of illuminated drains for the Corporation of London and Brighter Later (2013), a light installation for the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford driven by live weather data. Since 2002 she has made lens-based year-long live internet transmissions from remote locations, the latest of which is Current (2020-21) transmitting pixel-by-pixel from a ship anchored in the Greek Peloponnese. Collins is an artist and Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
Charlotte Cotton
Charlotte Cotton is a curator, writer and creative consultant who has explored photographic culture for over twenty years. She has held positions including curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, head of programming at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and curator-in-residence at Katonah Museum of Art, NY; International Center of Photography, NY; Metabolic Studio, CA; and California Museum of Photography. Her book, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, is published in ten languages and has been a key text in charting the rise of photography as an undisputed art form in the 21st century. The fourth edition was published in September 2020. Her curatorial projects and books include Words Without Pictures (2008-10); Photography is Magic (2012–15); Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (2016–18). She is currently the Artistic Director of the inaugural Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar.
Aldeide Delgado
Aldeide Delgado is the founder and director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). She has a background in advising and presenting at art history forums based on photography including lectures at the Tate Modern, Pérez Art Museum Miami, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and The New School. Delgado is a recipient of a 2019 Knight Arts Challenge, the 2018 School of Art Criticism Fellowship from SAPSTL-INBA, and a 2017 Research and Production of Critical Essay Fellowship from TEOR/éTica. Her areas of scholarly interest include a feminist and decolonial re-reading of the history of photography from the Latin American, the Caribbean and Latinx contexts. She is an active member of PAMM’s International Women’s Committee, IKT International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, US Latinx Art Forum and Art Table.
Christine Eyene
Christine Eyene is a London-based French-Cameroonian curator. In 2018, she curated the Summer of Photography 2018 at BOZAR (Brussels) and has organised numerous photography exhibitions as part of biennials and festivals including: FORMAT International Photography Festival (Nottingham, 2015); Summer of Photography (Brussels, 2014); 3rd PHOTOQUAI – Biennial of World Images (Paris, 2011); GWANZA: Month of Photography (Harare, 2011) an Brighton Photo Fringe (2010). In 2016, with Cameroonian curator Landry Mbassi, she co-founded YaPhoto, a project supporting emerging photographers in Cameroon. She continues to run the online platform Yaounde Photo Network (YPN) with a focus on exhibiting young Cameroonian photographers internationally and has presented them at OGU MAG, Tokyo (2017), Unseen Amsterdam (2018) and BiC Project Space, Casablanca (2019).
Anna Fox
Anna Fox is one of the most acclaimed British photographers of the last 35 years, best known for Work Stations: Office Life in London (1988), a study of office culture in Thatcher’s Britain. As Professor of Photography at University for the Creative Arts, Fox directs the project Fast Forward: Women in Photography. Her solo shows include Photographer’s Gallery, London, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Shanghai Center of Photography and group shows include Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant Garde at Tate Liverpool and How We Are: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain. In 2010 Fox was shortlisted for the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.
Sabeena Gadihoke
Sabeena Gadihoje is Professor at the AJK MCRC at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi where she teaches Digital Media Arts. A photo historian and curator, she started her career as an independent documentary filmmaker and cameraperson. Her film Three Women and a Camera won awards at Film South Asia at Kathmandu (1999) and the Mumbai International Film Festival (2000). She was a Fulbright Fellow at Syracuse University during 1995-6 and her book on India’s first woman press photographer Homai Vyarawalla, Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla (Mapin/ Parzor Foundation) was published in 2006. Gadihoke has curated several shows on photography, the most recent being a retrospective of photographer Jitendra Arya titled Light Works at the National Gallery of Modern Art at Bombay and Bangalore during 2018–9. Her research interests focus on the intersection of the still and moving image and she has written on contemporary documentary films, photo history, popular visual culture and female stardom in Bombay cinema.
Sunil Gupta
Sunil Gupta (b. New Delhi 1953) MA (RCA) PhD (Westminster) who has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration and queer issues. A retrospective is shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020/21) and Ryerson Image Center, Toronto 2021. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham. His work is in many public collections including; Tokyo Museum of Photography, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Tate and the Museum of Modern Art. He is represented by: Hales Gallery (New York, London), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi).
Rula Halawani
As a native of occupied East Jerusalem, Rula Halawani began her artistic career by registering the difficulties of living under a protracted political conflict. Halawani’s early works capture the many aspects of this reality, from the tedious moments of attempting to perform daily tasks under the restrictions of military occupation to the cyclical onset of violent siege that transforms Palestinian neighbourhoods, towns, and cities into overnight war zones. Rula’s recent work focuses on the traces of lives and history that can still be found in often overlooked details, whether in the material culture of Palestinian society or the transformed landscapes of her childhood. Halawani is based in Jerusalem where, in addition to her artistic practice, she was the founding director and an associate professor of the Photography program at Birzeit University. She is a recipient of Tasweer’s inaugural Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award grant that supports her newly-started For You Mother 2 – a series of photographs made with discontinued film stock, dedicated to her mother and Halawani’s childhood memories of wildflowers in Palestine and the disappearing Palestinian landscape, now replaced by Israeli settlements. Utilising traditional photographic means, Halawani calls forth the pre-1948 history of Palestinian culture and landscapes.
Mona Hassan
Mona Hassan’s investigative photojournalism includes working with the limestone quarry workers in the Manya Governorate of Upper Egypt, demonstrating her capacity to create unforgettable images of remote, underrepresented and unseen human life. Hassan was awarded a Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Project Award in 2021, for her proposal to continue to gain the trust and travel with a nomadic Arab tribe in search of pasture for their livestock, through the governorates of Egypt.
Elina Heikka
Elina Heikka is Museum Director at The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki since 2007. The Museum, founded in 1969, is the national special museum for photography and puts on exhibitions of Finnish and foreign contemporary photography, and presents the diverse history of photography. Elina Heikka holds MA in art history. She was editor and editor-in-chief in Valokuva – Finnish Photography magazine from 1994 to 1998. After that she worked as a researcher at the Finnish Museum of Photography and as a special researcher at the National Gallery / Central Art Archives from 2001 to 2007. She has published widely on contemporary photography, history of Finnish photography, contemporary art and visual culture.
Magdalene Keaney
Magdalene Keaney is Senior Curator, Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London. She previously held curatorial roles at the Australian National Portrait Gallery, London College of Fashion and was Senior Curator, Photographs at Australian War Memorial. At the NPG Keaney has curated the 2019 and 2020 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, Ethan James Green: Couples and Inspiring People: Collecting for the future. For more than twenty years she has written for catalogues, books and magazines, notably around fashion photography and contemporary practice. Recent publications include: 100 Fashion Icons (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2019) and contributions to Cindy Sherman (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2019) and Know My Name (National Gallery of Australia, 2020). In 2010 she curated Irving Penn Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery and authored the accompanying catalogue. She is currently working on a comprehensive representation of the NPG’s photographs collection as part of the Inspiring People redevelopment project and is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Karen Knorr
Karen Knorr (USA / UK) was born in Germany and grew up in Puerto Rico in the 1960’s. She is Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts since 2010. She lives and works in London, UK. Karen Knorr won the V International Photography Pilar Citoler Prize in 2011. She has been nominated for the Deutsche Börse in 2011 and 2012 and Prix Pictet in 2012 and 2018. Knorr’s work is included in collections worldwide including Shanghai Center of Photography, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA, Tate Museum, UK, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK and Pompidou Museum, France.
Maria Kapajeva
Maria Kapajeva is an artist, who works between Estonia and London. Her work often highlights peripheral histories, focusing on the representation of women. Her solo shows include Finnish Museum of Photography, Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, Lithuanian Gallery of Photography and Latvian Museum of Photography. Her video works were screened at VAFT in Finland, Luminocity Festival in Canada, NexT Film Festival in Romania and Berlin Feminist Film Week. In 2019 she was awarded with A Woman’s Work: Creative European Programme Grant. Her first book You Can Call him Another Man was shortlisted for Aperture Photobook Award 2018. The second one Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear was published in 2020.
Brigitte Lacombe
French photographer Brigitte Lacombe is known for her influential and revelatory portraiture. For four decades she has created iconic and intimate photographs of many of the world’s most celebrated artists, actors, politicians and intellectuals. Her books include Lacombe Anima | Persona (2009), a retrospective book of photographs from 1975-2008, and Lacombe Cinema | Theater (2001). As a special photographer, Lacombe has worked on many film sets since the mid. 1970s. She has worked on the films of Martin Scorsese, Mike Nichols, Anthony Minghella, Spike Jonze, Bennett Miller, Lynne Ramsay, David Mamet, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Steven Spielberg, Sydney Pollack, Sam Mendes, and Michael Haneke, Federico Fellini and many others. In 1985, Lacombe became the first and only staff photographer for Lincoln Center Theater in NY for seven years. Brigitte, a documentary film by director Lynne Ramsay, commissioned by Miu Miu Women’s Tales, was shown at the Venice and New York Film Festivals in 2019.
Emmy Lee Wall
Emmy Lee Wall is Executive Director of the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Capture is an annual lens- based festival with an extensive and diverse exhibition and public art programme; a youth-oriented learning programme, and an events that span tours, screenings, artist talks, and community events.
Thomas Modeen
Thomas Modeen is Director of the QSS Vocational School, Doha.
Christiane Monarchi
Christiane Monarchi is the founding editor of the online photography magazine Photomonitor which has published more than 1,200 features online in the past decade. In 2020 she co-founded Hapax Magazine, currently working on its first issue. Christiane is also a freelance curator, lecturer, artist mentor, and serves on the Board of Photofusion, on the steering committee of Fast Forward, Women in Photography, and as a trustee of The Hyman Foundation.
Shoair Movlian
Shoair Mavlian is Director of Photoworks UK. She is responsible for strategic vision and artistic direction of the organization. Recent Photoworks projects include Photoworks Festival: Propositions for Alternative Narratives (2020) and Brighton Photo Biennial: A New Europe (2018). From 2011–2018, Mavlian was Assistant Curator, Photography and International Art at Tate Modern where she curated exhibitions including Don McCullin (2019); Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art (2018); and Conflict, Time, Photography (2014). Mavlian has a background in photographic practice and the history of photography, with a focus on conflict and memory, Central and Latin American photography and emerging contemporary practice.
Hadeer Omar
Hadeer Omar is an Egyptian visual and time-based media artist, and educator. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design (2010) and MFA in Design Studies (2016) from Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar). Her passion for documentary and cultural movements crosses disciplines within art, design, and film, as a means of presenting her identity through her work. She combines mediums to explore various techniques and methods to produce her illustrations, photographs, and videos. With no formal training in photography, the artist found her way by utilising digital and analog tools, to observe her surroundings, document her process, and build a body of work that tells stories. Her experimentation with photography is not limited to portraiture, street, conceptual, or editorial photography. She approaches photography as a form of self-expression, and reflection of current political and social events.
Mary Pelletier
Mary Pelletier is a photography historian and writer based in London, whose research focuses on 19th and early 20th century photography in the Middle East. From 2018–2020, she worked as a Senior Photography Specialist with Qatar Museums. From 2016–2018, she was an arts correspondent and archival researcher based in Jerusalem, and prior to that managed James Hyman Gallery, London. Her ongoing research into the photography of Karimeh Abbud was shared at the Fast Forward: Women in Photography conference at the Tate Modern in December 2019, and she is a contributing editor at The Classic photography magazine.
Elizabeth Ransom
Elizabeth Ransom is a UK-based researcher, educator and visual artist working with alternative photographic practices. She is currently enrolled on the PhD research degree programme at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. As an artist Ransom takes from her own lived experiences of migration to explore transnationality, home and memory. Ransom’s research builds on theories of migration and place attachment particularly from the perspective of the migrant woman. Her work has been exhibited internationally in the UK, India, Mexico, China and the US.
Sefa Saglam
Sefa Saglam is Acting Chief of Qatar Museums’ Creative Hub, and Senior Advisor to Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar.
Adriane de Souza
Adriane de Souza is a Brazilian photographer currently based in Doha, Qatar. She received her BA degree in Sociology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She began to make photographs as a way of self-liberation, research, and to further understand human interactions and emotions. The goal of her work is to find personal freedom and provide tools for others to do the same. Her ongoing project –I Am Not My Father – explores concepts of masculinity. Qawiya (ةيوق) [strong] focuses on the presence and importance of women in sports in Qatar. De Souza is a member of the collective Photo Art Qatar, jurying and curating Tasweer’s 2021 Sheikh Saoud Al Thani Single Image Award. She is currently creating and facilitating a series of workshops and online resources for the International Girl Scouts movement, in collaboration with Tasweer.
Olga Stefatou
Olga Stefatou is a visual artist and photography consultant. She is currently living in her native country of Greece, after working as a senior photography specialist with Qatar Museums. Stefatou’s mixed media work investigates the idea of freedom and its connection to geopolitics, heritage and social structures, with a special interest in gender issues. Stefatou has exhibited her work widely, including at the Aga Khan Museum (CA); Doha Fire Station art space (QA); Los Angeles Month of Photography; Head On (AU); Les Boutographies (FR); and Gallery Negpos (FR). Stefatou is the creative director of the arts program at Saristra Festival Arts – a festival celebrating music and arts on Cephalonia Island, Greece.
Sueraya Shaheen
Sueraya Shaheen was born in Beirut, to Syrian parents. After graduating from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C., she worked at United Press International and assisted the White House photographer Dirck Halstead. Shaheen is the Photo Editor of Tribe Magazine – a non-profit publication that she co-founded in 2015, focusing on contemporary photography, video, and new media by Arab and Arab diaspora artists and photographers. Her ongoing photographic series – Encounters – constitutes an archive of portraits of contemporary Arab artists and has been exhibited widely.
Dr Jean Wainwright
Dr Jean Wainwright is a Professor of Contemporary Art and Photography and Director of the Fine Art and Photography Research Centre both at UCA. As a curator, critic and interviewer she has published extensively in the contemporary arts field, contributing to numerous catalogues and books. Along with the entire unedited Audio Arts archive, Wainwright’s ‘conversations’ for Audio Arts magazine were acquired by the Tate Gallery. She has published a number of interviews with woman photographers and has an archive of over 1,800 interviews. She appears regularly on TV and radio and is currently a consultant on a forthcoming BBC series on Andy Warhol. Her recent exhibitions which she both conceived and curated include: Beg Steal and Borrow, Bermondsey Project Space;Powerful Tides: 400 Years of Chatham and the Sea, The Historic Dockyard Chatham; Another Spring, Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Exeter; Gestures of Resistance, Romansto Cultural Centre, Athens; The Data Battlefield, Fotomuseum (FOMU), Antwerp. She also exhibited in Women in Photography – A History of British Trailblazers with 20 interviews recorded with women artists and included as part of the exhibition.
Anni Wallenius
Anni Wallenius works as Chief Collections Curator at The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Finland. Her background lies in art history and museology. In her work she is interested in finding new methods and practices to bring photography collections, collecting and audiences together in meaningful, relevant ways. The Finnish Museum of Photography is a national specialised museum of photography in Finland with an aim of documenting and collecting different historical and contemporary photographic cultures.
Val Williams
Val Williams is a curator and writer, and UAL Professor of the History and Culture of Photography, London College of Communication. She co-edits Photography & Culture and is on the Board of Fast Forward, Women in Photography, and co-convenes its biannual conference. Val was the founder director of Impressions Gallery, co-directed the Shoreditch Photo Biennale and began the Oral History of British Photography. Curated and co-curated/authored and co-authored projects include How We Are (Tate Britain); Daniel Meadows (Library of Birmingham); Warworks (V&A); Martin Parr (Barbican Art Gallery/ Phaidon); The Dead (National Media Museum); Who’s Looking at the Family? (Barbican); The Other Observers: Women’s Photography in Britain (National Museum of Photography / Virago); Ken: To be destroyed (Schwules Museum, Berlin/ Schilt); Soho Archives andSoho Nights andTish Murtha (Photographers Gallery);Seaside: Photographed (Turner Contemporary/ Thames&Hudson).
