About

Tanya Habjouqa is a photographer and educator, born in Amman to a Circassian father and a Texan mother, working with the remnants of displacement: photographs, film, objects, books, installation. Trained in anthropology and journalism, with an MA in Global Media and Postnational Communication from SOAS University of London, she has spent two decades as a journalist for outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Le Monde, and National Geographic.

Her work spans Palestine under occupation, Islamophobia in Europe, and police brutality in Texas. Within state and settler violence and the erasures that follow, she combines deep-field immersion with experimental narrative approaches. Her commissions range from Amnesty International and Oxfam to photography festivals and art institutions.

She treats the photographer's role as architecture: designing conditions where community voices hold their own authority. She has trained a generation of documentary photographers across the Middle East and North Africa (Arab Documentary Photography Program).

Her monograph Occupied Pleasures received a World Press Photo award and was named one of the best photo books of 2015 by TIME and the Smithsonian. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, L'Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

She is represented by East Wing (Doha/Berlin), alongside Edmund Clark, Rania Matar, and Mandy Barker. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, expected May 2027.