10 Photography Artists You Should Know From the MENA Region

Artists who know their way around the camera

The MENA region is home to all kinds of visual artists and one thing we are really good at is photography. From Cairo’s Photo Week to Qatar’s Tasweer Photo Festival, the region is gradually increasing its promotion and advocacy of the photographic medium. There is even a publication - Tribe - which is dedicated to documenting photography and moving images from across the Arab world. Keep reading to learn about just 10 of the outstanding photography artists you should know about with roots in the Arab region.

Rania Matar

Lebanese-Palestinian-American artist Rania Matar is famous for her stunning portraits of women, often in nature or seemingly abandoned pieces of architecture. Having grown up in Lebanon, she moved to the US in the 1980s and dedicates her work to the exploration of female adolescence and womanhood. Working between the US and the MENA region, she focuses on ideas of identity and individuality within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences. She has published four books, is in the collections of many institutions, and is also an associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil’s cinematic photographs are an homage to his native Egypt. Now based between New York and Paris, he hand colours black and white photographs in a technique that was once used in technicolour films. He is probably best known for works in which his subjects re-enact film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema, having even worked with the actress Salma Hayek in a film called "I Saved My Belly Dancer." His work is in prestigious collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fondation Louis Vuitton in France, Doha’s Mathaf and the UK’s Victoria & Albert Museum.

Tamara Abdul Hadi

Iraqi-Canadian photographer Tamara Abdul Hadi investigates the links between photography and representations of culture. Her work challenges stereotypes about Arab culture, identity and history. She began her career photographing for Reuters in Dubai and has contributed to major publications including The New York Times and The Guardian. She spent a year teaching photography to Palestinian women in Ramallah in 2009 and in 2018 she visited the Mesopotamian Marshes in southern Iraq to juxtapose images with a 1977 photobook. She is also a founding member of the first female photography collective in the region, Rawiya Collective. Her debut monograph Picture of an Arab Man was published in 2022.

Ibi Ibrahim

Yemeni-American artist Ibi Ibrahim’s work explores themes surrounding gender, immigration and resilience through ideas of in-betweenness, transition and the diasporic human experience. Much of his work offers an idiosyncratic exploration of Arab identities, specifically highlighting queer Arab-American perspectives and intertwining storytelling with advocacy, artistic research and care practices. His work is part of a number of institutional collections including the British Museum and Barjeel Art Foundation. He is also the co-editor of the book Photography from Yemen, which was published in 2024 by Makan Press, the publishing house he founded in the same year.

Laura Boushnak

Laura Boushnak is a Palestinian documentary photographer based in Amman. Her work mainly focuses on issues that stem from her own personal experience of gender, education, and aftermath of war. She began her career as a photographer for the Associated Press in Lebanon, then working for Agence France-Presse in Cyprus and Paris. During this period she covered conflict zones such including the war in Iraq and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Since 2008, she has been working independently, allowing her to focus on personal projects in the region. These include “I Read I Write”, which revolves around Arab women’s education and literacy, and “Survivor”, which highlights the aftermath of war and its impact on individuals long after the fighting has ended. Her work is part of major public collections, which include the British Museum. She is also a TED fellow.

Cyrus Mahboubian

British-Iranian artist Cyrus Mahboubian works exclusively with expired Polaroid film. He has a contemplative approach to photography and has an intentionally slow process, which is in response to the increasing use of technology in our lives. In recent years he has been working on composite works, cutting up prints and then putting them back together, sometimes even adding a spot of gold paint to introduce texture and contrast to his black and white photographs. His debut book Viscera was published in 2019.

Lamya Gargash

Emirati photographer Lamya Gargash documents the forgotten spaces in the public and private realms of Emirati society, with a strong concern with the relics of an ever self-renewing architecture. Her series “Familial” - which documents budget hotels in the UAE - was featured in the UAE’s first Venice Biennale exhibition It’s Not You, It’s Me, in 2009. She has also published an artist book, Presence, which was released in 2006 and documents recently vacated homes and structures in the UAE, which have been left for demolition or abandoned.

Mous Lamrabat

Instagram favourite Mous Lamrabat is a photographer from Morocco, and raised in Belgium. He is known for his colourful works that blend North African aesthetics with contemporary pop culture. His style merges his Moroccan heritage with his European upbringing, with figures in abayas juxtaposed with Western references, exploring a dual identity. His work has been featured in publications including Elle, Vogue Italia and Vogue Arabia. He has also collaborated with major fashion brands including Burberry.

Taysir Batniji

Gaza-born Taysi Batniji has been splitting his time between Palestine and France since being awarded a fellowship to study in France. His work is inspired by both his subjective story and current affairs. Often tinged with a sense of impermanence and fragility, his method involves distancing, diverting, stretching, conceptualising or playing with the initial subject, offering a poetic, sometimes acrid point of view on reality. His work is part of many prominent collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Imperial War Museum in London and the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi.

Mohamed Bourouissa

Mohamed Bourouissa is a multidisciplinary Algerian-French artist whose work often involves photography and video. His work takes a critical view of the mass media image, making photographs and videos of the people left behind at the crossroads of integration and exclusion. Having grown up in the suburbs of Paris, his work often comments on social marginalisation and power dynamics. His work is part of many prominent art collections including the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art .