Aida Muluneh is a photojournalist and Artist born in Ethiopia and raised abroad between Yemen and England. She graduated from the Communications Department with a Film major from Howard University. She has worked as a photojournalist at Washington Post. She has showcased her work mainly in European and African countries. There are permanent collections of her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Hood Museum, The RISD Museum of Art, and the Museum of Biblical Art in the United States. She is the first black woman to co-curate the Novel Peace Prize exhibition as a Canon Europe Ambassador. She is Jury-Member on Photography Competitions for Sony World Photography Awards 2017 and the World Press Photo Contest 2017. Her work has also been featured in notable publications and news outlets such as the New York Times, TIME, The Atlantic, Vice, OkayAfrica, The Guardian, Elle Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, CNN Style, and BBC.
She 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.
Aida Muluneh is a contemporary Ethiopian photographer known for her extraordinary portraits of face-painted African people in ideal settings. She captures African history in her photography and is known for telling a story about postcolonial Africa using photography. Aida’s works are powerful enough to capture anyone’s attention with their vibrant color and exquisite creativity. It is now internationally recognized as the concept is broad enough to touch people’s lives around the world. In her interview with Global Voices, she said “the thing that I’ve seen is that the challenges of black people are a global phenomenon and not just an American thing or an African thing,”. Aida is not only an icon for people in Africa but also around the world.
Aida graduated from the Communications Department with a Film major from Howard University. She has worked as a photojournalist at Washington Post. She has showcased her work mainly in European and African countries. There are permanent collections of her work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Hood Museum, The RISD Museum of Art, and the Museum of Biblical Art in the United States.
Aida is the first black woman to co-curate the Novel Peace Prize exhibition as a Canon Europe Ambassador. She is Jury-Member on Photography Competitions for Sony World Photography Awards 2017 and the World Press Photo Contest 2017. Her work has also been featured in notable publications and news outlets such as the New York Times, TIME, The Atlantic, Vice, OkayAfrica, The Guardian, Elle Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, CNN Style, and BBC.
Currently, Aida 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. 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, Ethiopia.
