Maliheh Afnan was born in 1935 to Persian parents in Haifa, Palestine. Her family moved to Beirut, where she went to high school and later graduated with a BA from the American University of Beirut in 1955. In 1956 she moved to Washington DC, where she graduated with an MA in Fine Arts at the Corcoran School of Art (1962). She spent 23 years in Paris, where she had numerous exhibitions, before settling in London in 1997, where she lived until 2016. Afnan has had several solo shows, including "Speak Memory" (curated by Lutz Becker) and Rose Issa Projects (2013). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions around the world and her work is in several public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum, New York; The British Museum, London; and the Institut du Monde Arabe, Akkram Ojjeh Foundation and BAII Bank Collection, all in Paris. She has also featured in several publications, most recently Familiar Faces (2013, Rose Issa Projects) and Maliheh Afnan: Traces, Faces, Places (2010, Saqi Books & Beyond Art Productions).
Rose Issa is a curator, writer and producer who has championed visual art and film from the Arab world and Iran for nearly 30 years. She has lived in Iran, Lebanon, France and, for the last 20 years, London, where from her private project space in Kensington she showcases upcoming and established artists, and produces exhibitions and publications with public and private institutions worldwide, including Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, and the Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg.
Michket Krifa is an independant visual art curator for Africa & the Middle East and artistic director for Bamako Encounters, the African Biennial of Photography. She is based in Paris, France.
