Born in Ethiopia in 1974, Aida Muluneh
left the country at a young age and spent an itinerant childhood
between Cyprus, Yemen and England. After several years in a boarding
school in Cyprus, she finally settled in Canada in 1985. In high
school, inspired partly by distorted media images of the Ethiopian
famine, she began taking photographs.
After studying film at Howard University
in Washington, D.C., she went on to work as a freelance photographer
for The Washington Post. Then in 2003, Muluneh
was chosen to be part of the groundbreaking show "Ethiopian Passages:
Dialogues in the Diaspora" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of
African Art. Later that same year, she made an appearance on "Imágenes
Havana" a group photography exhibition in Havana, Cuba - the same
fortuitous encounter that led to "TheUnhealing
Wound.". As with her photographs, she continues in this powerful
documentary to explore her own stated fascination with "how much
cultural retention is possible without, necessarily, cultural interaction."Muluneh's
photographs can be found in permanent collections of several Museums in
the United State. She is also the recipient of the European Union prize
for her work on Ethiopia in the 7th Biennale Afrique en Creations
-Nouvelles Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, in Bamako,
Mali.
Aida Muluneh is also the founder of D.E.S.T.A For Africa, an NGO that
promotes photography in Africa through workshops, exhibitions and
exchange. She lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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