Farzana Wahidy
Farzana Wahidy is an award-winning Afghan documentary photographer best known for her photographs of women and girls from Afghanistan. She was the first female Afghan photographer to work with international media agencies. Wahidy has been documenting the lives of Afghan women for more than a decade, and she recently established the Afghanistan Photographers Association.
Biography
Wahidy was born in Kandahar and moved to Kabul with her family at the age of six. She attended school during the Afghan civil war, and then an underground school after the Taliban took power in 1996. After their defeat in December 2001, Wahidy completed high school and enrolled in a two-year program with AINA Photojournalism Institute. In 2004 she began working as a photographer for Agence-France Presse and later joined the Associated Press. She is a graduate in Photojournalism from Loyalist College in Canada.
Wahidy’s work has been widely published in international magazines and newspapers and she has done assignments for numerous NGOs. In 2014 she created a project to train Afghan photographers, to review copyright law, and to research the history of photography in Afghanistan.
Wahidy’s photographs have been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Afghanistan, Canada, the United States, India, Pakistan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, China, Finland, France, and recently Portugal.
Wahidy is also a Fellow at the Academy of Exile at the University Duisburg-Essen and Folkwang University of Arts in Essen. She was a visiting faculty member at Bennington for Spring 2022 and is currently pursuing her MFA at Bennington.