Artist Bios​

​

aka TAWLA

aka TAWLA is a collective of photobook makers from the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region, supporting photobook making and advocating for alternative narratives. The collective focuses on showcasing photobooks produced by and originating from SWANA, as well as publishing their own zines and photobooks. Expanding beyond the traditional documentary frameworks, overused misrepresentations, and flattened narratives that has othered our communities for decades, we aim to support visual storytellers from our region, make photography and visual storytelling accessible, and create connections between local and international visual storytellers and audiences.

​​

Dana Qaddah

Dana Qaddah (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer whose work centres themes of building from, and through, colonial legacies, environmental and economic deterioration, and the condition of being abstracted from the sense of self and place.

​

Joyce Joumaa

Joyce Joumaa is a video artist based between Beirut and Montreal. After growing up in Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University in Canada. Her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment.

​

Roï Saade

Roï Saade is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the intersectionality between graphic design, photography, and the arts. Saade designs and curates photography exhibitions, film festivals, magazines and has developed Bound Narratives: A Photobook Library which brings together a curated selection of photobooks made from and about the Middle East and North African region by a wide variety of talented authors and artists.

​

Sharlene Bamboat

Sharlene Bamboat is a moving image and installation artist based in Tio’ta:ke/Montreal. Her practice often engages with translation, history, and music, uncovering sensory and fractured ways of knowing. Sharlene regularly collaborates with artists, musicians, and writers to animate historical, political, legal, and pop-culture materials. Sharlene has screened and exhibited internationally.