Joana Choumali Ivory Coast, b. 1974

Joana Choumali, born in 1974, is a visual artist/photographer based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She studied graphic arts in Casablanca (Morocco) and worked as an artistic director in an advertising agency before embarking on a career as a photographer. She works mainly on conceptual portraiture, mixed media and documentary photography. Much of her work focuses on what she learns about the countless cultures around her.

In her latest works, Joana Choumali embroiders directly on the images completing the act of creating the photographic image with a slow and meditative gesture. In 2014, she won the Cap Prize Award and the Emerging Photographer LensCulture Award 2014. In 2016, she received the Magnum Emergency Grant Foundation and the Fourthwall Books Award in South Africa.

In 2017, she exhibited her series “Translation” and “Adorn” at the Ivory Coast Pavilion during the 57th Venice International Biennale. On November 13, 2019, she became the first African winner of the Prix Pictet for her series “Ça va aller” on the theme of this cycle, “Hope”. Her work has been published in the international press: CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, El Pais, Le Monde, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Harper Bazaar Art, The Financial Times etc. Her book HAABRE, was published and edited in Johannesburg in 2016. Her book “Ça va aller” was published in 2022 by Nazraeli press, USA. She was named a 2020 Robert Gardner Fellow in photography by the Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnology, at Harvard University in the United States. Her work is included in collections such as the Leridon Collection, in Paris, the Museum of Photography in St Louis - Senegal, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Tiroche Deleon Collection, in Israel, the Carla and Pieter Schulting Collection in the Netherlands, the Collection of the Fondation H in Paris and Antananarivo, the MACAAL Museum of Contemporary African Art in Al Maaden – Marrakech, Harry David Art Collection in Greece, the Prix Pictet Collection in Switzerland. In the United States her work is included in the collec- tions of the Harvard Art Museum in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum (MET) in New York and the High Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta.