(b. 1956)
Born in Morocco in 1956, Lalla Essaydi lived for many years in Saudi Arabia. She attended L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and received her BFA from Tufts University in 1999 and later, her MFA from Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2003. Her photographs and paintings have been exhibited and collected by many leading international museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Fries Museum in the Netherlands , the Museum of Modern Art with a recent retrospective exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D. C. She currently divides her time between New York and Morocco.