Creative Conversations/digital: Laura El-Tantawy

Saturday, May 2 | 12PM 

Artist Laura El-Tantawy joins FotoFest's Steven Evans, and Max Fields, for a conversation on her work In the Shadows of the Pyramids, featured in the FotoFest Biennial 2020.

In addition to the conversation between El-Tantawy, Evans, and Fields, this program will feature a film screening of the artist’s short film In the Shadows of the Pyramids, a poetic meditation on the artist’s experience growing up in Egypt during moments of tense social and cultural change and political revolution.

About the guests
Laura El-Tantawy (b. 1980) is a British/Egyptian documentary photographer, bookmaker, and mentor. Born in Worcestershire, she has studied in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her work is recognized for its uniquely lyrical eye on reality, exploring the relationship between place and affect, home and belonging. Her work has been awarded, exhibited, and published internationally, including in renowned outlets such as The New Yorker, Afar, Le Monde, National Geographic, Time, The New York Times, Huck, and Foam.

She has presented her work in solo exhibitions at venues in Belgium, France, United Arab Emirates, India, the UK, Germany, Spain, Japan, and in the US, and has participated in group exhibitions around the globe, most notably in biennials and festivals such as BredaPhoto Festival, Netherlands; Unseen Amsterdam; Fotoleggendo, Rome; and Look/13, Liverpool, UK.

El-Tantawy’s self-published monographs have garnered international accolades.

In 2015, she released her first title, In the Shadow of the Pyramids, a first-person account that illustrated the fraught connections between subjective memory and personal identity. The publication was shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, awarded annually to an artist of any nationality who has made a significant contribution to photography in Europe. Her other titles include The People (2015), a newsprint celebrating the Egyptian Revolution of 2011; Beyond Here Is Nothing (2017), a meditation on the idea of home; and A Star in the Sea (2019), an illustrated exercise that encourages embracing the unexpected.

In 2011, El-Tantawy earned her MA in Art and Media Practice from the University of Westminster, London, and in 2009, she served as a research fellow at the University of Oxford. Since graduating, she has taught at universities around the globe and presented artist talks at many of the world’s most prestigious colleges, museums, and research institutes. She is currently living and working between London and Cairo.