Aïda Muluneh
Aïda Muluneh’s photographs are almost like paintings, featuring women in majestic outfits and facepaint, set against vivid, stylized backdrops. She talks about developing her artistic voice, the role of spirituality in her work, her series on Islam in Ethiopia, and what she thinks Westerners get wrong about African art.
Born in Ethiopia in 1974, Aida Muluneh left the country at a young age and spent an itinerant childhood between Yemen and England. After several years in a boarding school in Cyprus, she finally settled in Canada in 1985. In 2000, she graduated with a degree from the Communication Department with a major in Film from Howard University in Washington D.C. After graduation, she worked as a photojournalist at the Washington Post; her work can also be found in several international publications. As an exhibiting artist, Muluneh’s work has been shown in South Africa, Mali, Senegal, Egypt, Canada, United States, France, Germany, England, and China, to name a few countries. A collection of her images can be found in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Hood Museum, and the Museum of Biblical Art, all in the U.S. She is the 2007 recipient of the European Union Prize in the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, in Bamako, Mali, as well as the 2010 winner of the CRAF International Award of Photography in Spilimbergo, Italy. As one of the leading experts on photography from Africa, she has been a jury member on several photography competitions, most notably the Sony World Photography Awards 2017 and the World Press Photo Contest 2017. She has been on panel discussions on photography at events such as African Union cultural summit, Art Basel, and Tedx/Johannesburg. Muluneh is the founder and director of the Addis Foto Fest (AFF), the first international photography festival in East Africa, hosted since 2010 in the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She continues to educate, curate, and develop cultural projects with local and international institutions through her company DESTA (Developing and Educating Society Through Art) For Africa Creative Consulting PLC (DFA) in Addis Ababa. Most recently, she was included in the 25th edition of the Museum of Modern Art’s biannual New Photography survey, and was a 2018 winner of the CatchLight Fellowship, which recognizes the novel use of photography to bring awareness to challenging social issues.