Antoine Tempé

Antoine Tempé is born in 1960 in Paris, France. He studied in Paris and moved to New York City to work as a trader in 1984. Five years later, he started working as an amateur photographer, spending about half his time between photography and training as a dancer. Tempé covered New York nightlife for various European magazines and started photographing his dancer friends in his studio. This work quickly led him to collaborate with American dance companies. In 2000, Tempé started working full time in photography, embarking on a one-year photographic journey through West Africa and Madagascar. Over the years, he has amassed a substantial collection of portraits of artists, performers, dancers, cultural figures and intellectuals, as seen in the series Dancers of Africa (2001), Faces of Africa (2007), and Let’s dance! (2011). Since 2011, Tempé is based in Dakar, Senegal where he worked on the [re-]Mixing Hollywood project with Omar Victor Diop, and the series Waa Dakar (2015) depicting portraits of people carrying out various small trades of the street.

Maïmouna Guerresi

Maïmouna Guerresi was born as Patrizia Guerresi in Vicenza, Italy, in 1951, to a religious Catholic family. She changed her name when she converted to Sufi Islam, after she married a Senegalese in 1991. Sufism has proven to be a source of personal growth and artistic inspiration for her. Most of her work is centered on the Islam, drawing inspiration from the Mouride brotherhood of whom her family in Senegal are part of. Guerresi uses symbolism in multicultural and spiritual themes to create a captivating sensory experience for the viewer. One of her recurring theme is Womanhood, empowering women through metaphors that represent the vital unifying qualities of the feminine archetype and its special healing potential. In her sculptures, photographs, and videos, the veiled women merge with their outfits, becoming almost architectural works. Her series The Giants (2009) erects the bodies into divine temples. In the Minarets Hats (2011) series, the tall or large patterned textile hats she has fashioned become sculpture.

Joana Choumali

Joana Choumali was born in 1974 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She studied Graphic Arts in Casablanca, Morocco, and worked as an art director for an advertising agency in Abidjan before choosing a photography career. Choumali uses photography to explore issues of identity and the diversity of African cultures. After losing her grandmother in 2001, she explored the link between past and present in an attempt to understand her family history. In the series Resilients (2014), she documented young, professional African women who also struggled with connecting to their family's traditional past. Choumali also reflected on the slow disappearance of the scarification, an age-old practice of performing a superficial incision in a person’s skin. In Hââbré (2014), she documented the last generation of people, mostly emigrated from Burkina Faso where Hââbré means both writing and scarification, bearing an imprint of the past on their faces. The project gathers their testimonies and looks at their integration into Ivoirian society.

Delphine Diallo

Delphine Diallo was born in 1977 in Paris, France to a French mother and Senegalese father. In 1999, she graduated in Visual arts at the Académie Charpentier, and began her career in the music industry for seven years working as a graphic designer, video artist, and art director. After leaving her work, Diallo moved to Saint-Louis, Senegal, where she met her extended family and started portraying them as seen in the series Roots (2003). Influenced by Malick Sidibé, her portraits are enriched by colors, collages, and drawings to underline the emotions of her subjects and tell the whole story. In 2007, Diallo met the renowned photographer Peter Beard, who pushed her to pursue a career in photography after seeing her work. In 2008, she moved to New York to explore her mixed medium approach to photography. She worked on several series including Afropunk and Women of New York, praising the life of people in the streets and turning them into heroic figures. Her latest series Highness examines the sensuality of the black female figure, the power of spirituality and healing, as well as the marvel and mystery of masks.