Dynamic conversation: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora

Dynamic conversation: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora
2 p.m.

Admission to the Museum and all exhibitions and programs is free every Sunday thanks to generous support from the Society of the Arts (SOTA), City Center Allentown, the Gadomski Foundation, and the Sylvia Perkin Perpetual Charitable Trust.

MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora is a publication committed to establishing and representing a collective voice of women photographers of African descent. The inaugural issue of MFON features more than one hundred women photographers across the Diaspora and includes an introduction by Dr. Deborah Willis, MacArthur Fellow and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. It also features essays written by women scholars, journalists, and artists. Subsequent issues of MFON will feature photographic essays of four or five photographers with in-depth interviews and essays that will contextualize the works. MFON was founded by award winning documentary photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and critically acclaimed, award winning visual artist, Adama Delphine Fawundu with the goal of creating awareness of the impact that women photographers of African descent have in the world.

Today’s discussion will be led by MFON editors Adama Delphine Fawundu and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, followed by a talk back with the audience.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photo-based multidisciplinary award-winning visual artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Over the past twenty-five years Ms. Fawundu has produced several photographic archives of works documenting the life and culture of people within the African Diaspora. These works were published in numerous anthologies such as Africa Under the Prism: Contemporary African Photography from the Lagos Photo Festival by Joseph Gergel, and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840–Present by Dr. Deborah Willis. Her works have also been in publications such as the New York Times, Time magazine, and New York magazine. Ms. Fawundu is a New York Foundation of the Arts Photography Fellow.

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a documentary photographer based in New York City. Her work has been published in the New York Times, BBC, Washington Post, Le Point Afrique, CBS News, and Vogue among other publications. She is the coeditor of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. Ms. Barrayn was recently awarded the Reporting Grant for Women’s Stories from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF). Her other photography projects have been supported by Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. Her latest project on the Baye Fall sufi order of Senegal was exhibited at Galleria Biagiottie in Florence, Italy, and at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), New York. She has also exhibited at Galarie Ethiopiques (Senegal), Brighton Photo Biennial (UK), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (USA). She was recently an artist-in-residence at the Waaw Centre for Art and Design in Saint-Louis, Senegal.