Aïda Muluneh

Aïda Muluneh (born 1974) is an Ethiopian photographer and contemporary visual artist based in Addis Ababa.

She does commercial work as well as fine-art photography and photojournalism in Addis Ababa and elsewhere.

Muluneh won the European Union Prize at African Photography Encounters and the CRAF International Award of Photography.

Muluneh was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1974.

She spent her childhood in Cyprus, Greece, the UK, and Yemen before settling in Canada in 1985.

As a teenager, Muluneh attended Western Canada High School in Alberta, Canada.

While there, she was on the school's basketball team and had aspirations of becoming a basketball star.

She also thought of becoming a lawyer or excelling in a similar prestigious profession.

These plans took an unexpected turn, when her art teacher opened up a disused darkroom for his students and gave her a camera to use.

Although Muluneh began shooting photographs in high school, she did not imagine it as a career until her grandfather, who lived in Ethiopia, came to visit her family.

He had served in the Ethiopian Air Force, and enjoyed painting in his spare time.

He saw something in her work and told her to continue to work as an artist, rather than putting off her passion as a hobby.

She received her BA in film, radio, and television from Howard University in 2000.

After her studies, she worked as a photojournalist at the Washington Post, and since then, her work has been shown in several publications.

She has since returned to Ethiopia and is based in Addis Ababa.

Muluneh incorporates primary colors into her art photography work.

The deep reds, blues, and yellows in her paintings can be seen from a great distance.

The primary colors reference church wall paintings that can be seen in Ethiopia.

Muluneh's work also primarily features women due to her belief that there is power in the gaze of a woman.

By utilizing subjects that are primarily women, Muluneh is able to share her experience with the world.

In an interview with NPR, Muluneh stated, "There's an expression that if you teach something to a man, you teach one person, but if you teach something to a woman, you're teaching the whole society."

Muluneh stated, "My work often starts with a sketch, and I approach each image as a film production in which the character, set design, lighting and styling come together. I utilize face painting as a form in which the inspiration is driven by body ornamentation, not only in my country, but also various parts of the world. I am deeply influenced by various traditional cultures, hence in a sense, I am bringing the past into the future through various forms."

Muluneh founded Developing and Educating Societies Through the Arts (DESTA), through which she continues to facilitate and expand cultural projects.

Her work is included in the collection of the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC.

One of her pieces was selected as the poster picture for the traveling exhibition The Divine Comedy, Contemporary African Artists.

She is the founder and director of the international photography festival Addis Foto Fest, a biennial exhibition of global photography.

The Addis Foto Fest aimed to bring photography, which had yet to be fully accepted as an art form, to the masses in the same way that photographic studios brought to the public an activity that was once seen as restricted to the aristocracy.

Several thousand people attended the exhibitions, aspiring photographers participated in workshops and portfolio reviews with established photographers, and new audiences found their way into galleries and cultural institutions for the first time.

Muluneh's work recognizes the ability that images have to influence the world's perception of people.

Her first solo exhibit series, The World is Nine, at David Krut Projects in New York, was created in 2016 and inspired by her grandmother.

Muluneh digs deep down to her roots as an Ethiopian and gives birth to a humble 28-piece series of culture, space, politics, history, the present, and future in a modern artistic way, including photographs taken at Leghar train station in Addis Ababa of models with African and Ethiopian complexions, bodies painted in bright bold colors, and traditional African body paint.

Muluneh reminisces on a time when she was not yet born but is instilled with her grandmother's words that "The world is a 9, it is never complete and it's never perfect."

Muluneh stated, "Each work is a reflection of conscious and sub-conscious manifestations of time and space".

In her photograph "The Past, the Present and the Future" from the World Is Nine series, Muluneh expresses full awareness of her present with a firm grip on her past and future.

Author M. Neelika Jayawardane's outlook agrees, "…somewhere in between nostalgia for the past and a future that has yet to come".

In the photograph, a single woman represents the three stages of a woman's life, the past, present and future.

The woman's body is painted in a bright Cerulean blue, with white dots going down the center of her face, following her neck and chest.

These dots are symbolic of asymmetry and traditional African body painting.

She wears the colors of the Ethiopian flag proudly in a bright canary yellow head scarf that hangs before the front of her upper body and a bold long red dress.

In 2020, she was given the Award for Photographic Curatorship of the Royal Photographic Society.