Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil was born in Cairo in 1972 and lives and works in Paris and New York. He makes black and white gelatin silver prints and paints each one by hand, so the prints within a single edition differ from one another. He also makes short films.

He began in 1992 with staged scenes modelled on film stills of the golden age of Egyptian cinema. His colouring borrows the hand tinting of Technicolor-era film and studio portraits. Memory, exile, dream, life and death recur. Early sitters were film stars and artists, his "personal icons". His self-portraits, taken in many places, almost always show him from the back with his face hidden. I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015) is both a series and a film.

Palazzo Grassi in Venice gave him his first retrospective, Youssef Nabil: Once Upon a Dream, from 2020 to 2021. The Musée d'Orsay in Paris showed De rêver encore in 2026. He won the Seydou Keïta Prize for Portraiture in Bamako in 2003 and was made Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2022. The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art hold his work.