Photographer, Artist, Teacher​

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Born in 1977, Amira Ziyan lives and works as a photographer, artist and teacher in Yarka, a Druze village in the north of Israel. She holds both a Bachelors and Masters of Fine Arts from Haifa University. Ziyan's artwork focuses on staged photography. Her work often emphasizes the subject's absence by evoking their presence through objects. The main subjects of Ziyan's art are women from her Israeli Druze society, as well as identity and gender in contemporary Druze culture.

Ziyan’s principal artistic medium is staged photography. She builds her works as planned compositions in which image, color, and landscape are employed with intention to express a symbolic narrative. At the center of this creative process is the "stage" that she creates for the photographed scenes. Through this, Ziyan aims to create works that the viewer can "read." 

As a woman, photographer, and artist from Yarka, and a member of the Druze community, Ziyan uses her art to mediate the two worlds between which she finds herself torn: the traditional and the modern.