Lalla Essaydi

Lalla Essaydi was born and raised in Morocco. Living for twenty years in Saudi Arabia, four in France, and a decade and a half in America has given her exposure to multiple dimensions of women's lives in both Islamic and Western cultures. From 1990 to 1994 she attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris followed by studies in the United States. She received a B.F.A. from Tufts University in 1999, concentrating on women and art, and an M.F.A. in painting and photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2003. Her exhibition career began soon after completion of her B.F.A., and she received her first solo show in 2003. Since then she has been exhibiting widely, both nationally and internationally, and her works have been accessioned by almost twenty museums. Essaydi now lives in New York City and Marrakech.

Considering the past in painting and the present in the camera's view, Essaydi produces paintings, photographs, videos, and film installations. The compositions of her photographs are guided by her training in painting in their placement of cloth, bodies and symbolic objects, all covered with calligraphic forms. Her purpose is consistent-to establish a position from which a Muslim woman living in the West can address both the gendered circumstances of her memories of the past and her observations of contemporary cultural change.

S.B.