History & Mission

Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) is an independent non-profit art initiative founded in Egypt in 2004. CIC’s mission spans contemporary art and media educational programming that responds to and develops visual culture and artistic practice, engagement, and discourse.

Since its founding by a group of artists and photographers who today make up its Board of Trustees, CIC has a special interest in the many urgent roles of the photographic image within society and media. Through CIC PhotoSchool we provide courses, workshops, and technical and professional facilities, aimed at local and regional capacity to develop a broad and critically effective visual media landscape.

Contemporary art programming at CIC aims to produce critical contexts for a range of , practices via exhibitions, residencies, special projects, discursive events, publications and educational activities. Working beyond the curatorial logic of the ‘platform’ or ‘showcase’; a primary question for CIC as a whole is rooted in the creation of milieux in which ideas, practices and discussions related to the broadest remit of visual culture can be fostered. We consider artistic and curatorial practices we work with to be operating within and addressing simultaneously both local and international contexts and debates.

Across the PhotoSchool and broader contemporary art programming, CIC’s mission evolves from an interest in the multifarious modes of image production and consumption, contemporary and historical, arising from within and without art practices, and the ways in which they reflect and respond to the present.

Board Of Trustees

Maha Maamoun (Chair) is a Cairo based photographer. She studied economics and received an MA in Middle Eastern History at the American University in Cairo. She has worked as a project manager for Pro Helvetia – Arts Council of Switzerland, Cairo Office and has worked for four years as a photo lab supervisor in the Journalism and Mass Communication Department at AUC. She has participated in a number of international art workshops and group exhibitions, and co-curated Meeting Points 5, 2007, with the Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF) in Brussels.

Thomas Hartwell (Vice Chair) is a Cairo-based freelance photojournalist whose work is distributed by Redux and Corbis agencies in New York. He has spent over thirty years in the Middle East region, based in Egypt, photographing news, features and documentary projects on assignment for a variety of international publications and organizations. He has taught photography at the American University in Cairo, Cairo University, the University of Texas, and the University of Algiers as a Fulbright scholar.

Rana ElNemr (Treasurer) is a Cairo based freelance photographer with a background in journalism. She freelances for international news agencies, magazines and advertising agencies. She participated in several photography and art exhibitions in Cairo, Tokyo and New York. In 2003 she received the bronze award in the Canon Digital Creators Contest in Tokyo, and in 2005 the grand prize from Bamako Photo Festival in Mali.

Paul Ayoub-Geday (Secretary) is a Cairo based multi-disciplinary artist with an MA in Mass Communication from the American University in Cairo who has studied film making at the London Film School. He has been using a camera to record picture and film essays for the past twenty years and has participated in a number of group exhibitions. He is a publisher, and the creator and art director of the Egypt Almanac 2000 and 2001.

Heba Farid is a multi-disciplinary artist and photographer with a background in architecture, fine arts and theory. She has contributed over the past twenty years to exhibitions in North America, Europe and the Middle East, and has participated in the founding and running of several artist-run collectives in Canada and the US. She has been based in Cairo for the last nine years.