Nadia Mounier (b. 1988, Cairo) is a visual artist, curator, and arts manager. With a focus on photography, she has developed an artistic and curatorial body of work that explores representations of the self through navigating personal and public archives. She is interested in how photography constructs memory and identity, and how personal narratives intersect with collective histories. Through her projects, she reexamines the ways images shape our understanding of intimacy, belonging, and social visibility.
She managed the Arts and Culture program at The Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF) from 2023 to 2026, where she integrated creative programming with community engagement and youth empowerment.
Nadia has participated in numerous international residencies and fellowships, including Akademie Schloss Solitude 2018 (DE), Zurich University of the Arts, and Braunschweig Projects at HBK Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig in 2019 (DE).
She is passionate about collaboration, collective work, and alternative arts education programs. She has been part of various art collectives interested in the city, image production, motherhood, and the politics of representation. She is currently based in Cairo.
In her open project Cairo Snaps, which began in 2012, she focuses on the concept of public space; non-private spaces, and spaces that are economically uninteresting. Her photos are characterized by the use of everyday objects within an atmosphere reflecting middle-class aesthetics and mentality.
“Going through “Cairo Snaps” is like roaming Cairo undisturbed, embracing the crowds and opening your heart and mind to its peculiarities, a brief change from the flood of sarcasm that overtakes our perception of the city. Mounir gently reacts to Egyptian popular culture, recording standard events without filters or additions, capturing the city’s random flavors and features and rendering its natural strangeness.” Mohamed Abdel Raouf, Mada Masr
In her recent works, Mounier investigates the pictorial representation of herself as a woman, and of the women closest to her, in both public and seemingly private contexts. Her long-term project entitled Was That Really You? Mounier uncovers an explanation of their shared status in both images and real life through the process of reviewing these images, moving them between different contexts, and deconstructing their aesthetics. With a particular interest in forms of self-dramatization as well as censorship, she constantly switches between the roles of image consumer and image producer. In a series of self-portraits, she channels the aspect of performativity that inevitably arises when having one’s image taken, no matter how ‘private’ the act. She comes full circle to arrive at a triadic intersection of her own relationship with photography, in which self-image and external perception are reflected in the motif of motherhood.
Her work was exhibited at Museum Rietberg, Zurich (2019) and the Museum of Photography, Braunschweig (2012). She also took part in numerous local and international exhibitions and festivals, including PhotoCairo 6th edition (2017) Cairo, The Marrakech Biennale 6th (2016), and “Autonomy of Self” (2015), London.