Intisar Abioto

Intisar Abioto is an artist engaged in dancing, photography, and writing. Utilizing a research focus on the global African Diaspora, her form of story inquiry as a way of life has taken her from Memphis to Berlin to Djibouti seeking the stories, experiences, and dreams of people within the diaspora.

Abioto has shown her photographs of people of African descent in Oregon at venues including the Multnomah County Public Library, Powell’s City of Books, University of Oregon’s White Box Gallery, Portland State University’s Littman Gallery, and Ori Gallery.

She’s the creator of The Black Portlanders, an ongoing photo essay and blog that’s imaging people of African descent in Portland, Oregon. The Black Portlanders blog documents her interviews with black Portlanders. Once the text is posted alongside her photographs, they become compelling visual essays. She was a contributing photographer to MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora (2017) and her photographs were featured in the Urban League of Portland’s State of Black Oregon 2015.

Along with her four artist sisters, she is the co-creator of The People Could Fly Project, a 200,000-mile flying arts expedition exploring realities of flight and freedom within Virginia Hamilton’s award-winning book, The People Could Fly. Abioto has a degree in Dance and has performed at Paragon Gallery, Portland Art Museum, and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center.

Traci Bartlow

A native of Oakland, California, Traci Bartlow is an artist and entrepreneur with a longstanding career as an activist, business owner, photographer, dance educator, lecturer, curator, and cultural archivist. In 2023 she received a proclamation from the mayor of Oakland, California recognizing her significant contributions as “a great woman of Hip Hop.” This reflects decades of work in Hip Hop culture the areas of dance and photography.

Bartlow is a story consultant and contributing writer for the 2022 EMMY award-winning film If Cities Could Dance – Oakland Boogaloo.  She has served her community for many years as a founding member of EastSide Cultural Center, a board member for City Center Dance Theater, and consulted with several arts and social justice organizations on scaling their impact on their changing neighborhoods.

In 2024 she was awarded a YBCA Creative Corps Fellowship in support of her transformative community engagement programming. Currently she is preparing to publish a coffee table photography book of photographs and stories of her work as a photojournalist in the 1990s.

Idris Hassan

Bay Area based photographer and visual artist Idris Hassan is dedicated to uplifting, cultural, life moments through her creative work. In her evolution as a documentarian she has traveled across the country and abroad capturing the visual essence of various communities.

Her photography and collage works reveal the worlds of artists, musicians, and families, showcasing the legacy of creative culture. Her style evokes such greats as Gordon Parks, Romare Bearden, and Carrie Mae Weems. Ms. Hassan’s photography, collage, and video work has been featured in the The Black Woman is God exhibition at SOMArts in San Francisco, the Black Artists on Art: The Legacy Exhibit at Oakstop Gallery, the Annual Art of Living Black Exhibition at the Richmond Art Center and at various exhibitions in the Bay Area.

In 2016, Ms. Hassan exhibited her work as part of a residency at Green Olive Arts in Morocco, Africa. Her work has been featured in the Summer 2015 issue of African Voices, A Soulful Collection of Art and Literature. In 2018 her photography was featured at Photoville in Brooklyn, New York City, as part of the exhibition Alter: Prayer, Ritual, Offerings curated by Women Photographers of the African Diaspora.

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a documentary photographer based in New York City. Her work has been supported with grants and fellowships from the International Women’s Media Foundation, Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies, and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. She is a four-time recipient of the Community Arts Grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council. Her projects have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC, and OkayAfrica, among other publications. She has curated exhibitions at the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Port Authority of NY/NJ, and has given talks on her photography at Yale University, New York University, Howard University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She was recently an artist-in-residence at the Waaw Centre for Art and Design in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Barrayn is the founder and coeditor of Mfon: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. 

Photo Credit: Alex Bershaw

Adama Delphine Fawundu

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts.

Ms. Fawundu has been documenting global hip-hop and urban youth culture for over twenty years. Her art re-imagines and glorifies the strength of African and Black diaspora culture and identities that continue to evolve, despite the social violence of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonialism.

Ms. Fawundu is a co-founder and author of the book and movement, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is currently an artist-in-resident at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. Her awards include the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Grant, and the Brooklyn Arts Council Grant.

Ms. Fawundu’s works can be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Norton Museum of Art, Corridor Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, University of Maryland.

MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora

MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora is an independently published anthology edited by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Adama Delphine Fawundu. MFON features photographic works created by 118 African and Diasporic women artists representing 27 nations. It will soon be relaunched as an online platform. Our goal is to promote an international representative voice of women photographers from continental Africa and its diaspora.