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Lalla Essaydi is a Moroccan artist, born in 1956 in Marrakech, Morocco and later raised in Saudi, Arabia for a short time. Essaydi is now well-known for her photography of Muslim women and her ability to subtly challenge stereotypes that are associated with Arab culture. Her work is extremely autobiographical in nature and focuses on actual experiences she went through in her own life.

After leaving to be educated in Europe and the United States, Essaydi began experimenting with various forms of art, including photography, mixed media, video, painting, and installation art. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/TUFTS University in May of 2003. Essaydi began her work, but quickly realized in order to move forward in her own life with her artwork, she would need to return home to Morocco first and revisit the place that had given her so much inspiration in the first place. Essaydi began basing her artwork on events and spaces that affected her as a child rather than as an adult.

After revisiting Morocco, Essaydi began her first series, Converging Territories, which took place in the building she was often sent to as a child. If she disobeyed or stepped out of line, Essaydi was confined to this house (the set of Converging Territories) with only servants and was not allowed to speak to anyone for a month. She began Converging Territories as an exploit of stereotypes in Muslim cultures and continued the theme into her next series, Les Femmes du Maroc. This next series dealt with the veiling and unveiling of women and the changing stereotypes associated with each new stage in a Muslim woman's life from childhood to adulthood. She says in relation to her artwork, "I wish to present myself through multiple lenses as artist, as Moroccan, as Saudi, as traditionalist, as liberal, as Muslim. In short, I invite viewers to resist stereotypes.” Essaydi uses intricate forms of calligraphy and henna in her artwork, making a point to cover her subjects from head to toe with the writing. Calligraphy is typically only taught to Muslim men and most art forms like photography and calligraphy are only seen as hobbies of Muslim women, so Essaydi's detailed henna forms and ability to make the viewer feel uncomfortable with voyeurism is very impressive. In response to her fully clothed rather than nude subjects, Essaydi said, "In my photographs, I have removed the nudity that is found in the paintings, and created instead, "real" domestic scenes in which Arab women are engaging the viewer, disrupting the voyeuristic tradition, and dictating how they are to be seen."