Photo: Mario Epanya ©
Born in Addis Ababa in 1974, Muluneh graduated from Howard University in Washington D.C with a degree from the Communication Department with a major in Film. Her photography has been published widely and can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Hood Museum, The RISD Museum of Art, and the Museum of Biblical Art in the United States. She was the 2007 recipient of the European Union Prize in the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali, the 2010 winner of the CRAF International Award of Photography in Spilimbergo, Italy, and the 2018 CatchLight Fellow in San Francisco, USA. In 2019, she became the first black woman to co-curate the Nobel Peace Prize exhibition and in the following year, she returned as a commissioned artist for the prize.
She has been a jury member for several photography competitions, most notably the Sony World Photography Awards and the World Press Photo Contest in 2017. She has also been on various panel discussions on photography, including the African Union Cultural Summit, Art Basel, Tedx/Johannesburg, and the Sem Presser Lecture at the World Press Photo Festival in Amsterdam in 2019.
A Canon Ambassador, Muluneh founded the Addis Foto Fest (AFF), the first international photography festival in East Africa held since 2010 and the Africa Foto Fair established in Côte d'Ivoire. Through her new venture, she has also established the Africa Foto Fair virtual publication that brings emerging and established talents to the global photography community. In addition, she established the Africa Print House which offers fine art photography printing through her studio based in Abidjan, a creative space that offers end-to-end solutions for photographers in Africa. As an educator and cultural entrepreneur, she continues to develop projects with local and international institutions in Ethiopia and Côte d'Ivoire.