About

Tanya Habjouqa is an artist and educator whose counter-archival practice examines occupation, erasure, and ecology while tracing how frontier logic shapes citizenship, race, and belonging. Working across photography, film, artist books, and installation, she treats the photographer's role as architecture: designing conditions where community voices hold their own authority.

Born in Amman to a Jordanian Circassian father and a Texan mother, she trained in anthropology and has spent two decades as a journalist across the Middle East, Europe, and Texas, for outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Le Monde, and National Geographic. Her work often uses the everyday as evidence and the absurd as disguise. Occupied Pleasures received a 2014 World Press Photo award, and the monograph was named one of the best photo books of 2015 by TIME and the Smithsonian.

As a founding mentor of the Arab Documentary Photography Program, she spent a decade training a generation of documentary photographers across MENA. Amnesty International and Oxfam, among others, have commissioned her for investigative and collaborative visual projects.

She holds an MA from SOAS University of London (2007) and is completing her MFA at UW–Madison (2027) as one of four research fellows selected by the Department of Art.

Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institut du Monde Arabe; and the Carnegie Museum of Art. She is represented by East Wing (Doha/Berlin).