Moroccan-born artist Lalla Assia Essaydi has earned international acclaim for her striking portraits of Arab women. Deeply inspired by her Moroccan heritage, Essaydi’s photographs blend a rich assemblage of cultural practices and materials, including Arabic calligraphy, henna, and textile art. Engaging with Orientalist imagery from the Western painting tradition, Essaydi challenges European fantasies of the Arab woman behind the veil. Using her own life experience as inspiration, she explores how gender and power are inscribed on women’s bodies and the physical spaces they occupy. Essaydi embraces a pluralism of meaning in her work, declaring: "In my art, I wish to present myself through multiple lenses — as artist, as Moroccan, as traditionalist, as Liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite viewers to resist stereotypes."
Lalla Essaydi was born in Marrakech in 1956, the same year Morocco gained independence from French colonial rule. Essaydi’s work addresses the complexities of postcolonial identity in a country that straddles between East and West, where Western customs and consumer practices have been inherited as afterlives of colonialism. In her recent series Conflicted Identities, the artist constructs dresses out of beer bottle caps for her models, commenting on the prevalence of alcohol in Morocco despite the country’s Muslim identity.
Essaydi spent her foundational years living in traditional Muslim society in Marrakech and Saudi Arabia before moving to Paris, where she studied painting at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The artist later relocated to Boston, where she earned her BFA from Tufts University (1999) and her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University (2003). As a Moroccan artist with Western training, Essaydi bridges disparate cultures and brings together numerous perspectives in her work.
