Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is an award-winning documentary and portrait photographer working in the medium for 20 years. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. Her work has also been published in Vogue, National Geographic, The Washington Post, VOX, NPR, BBC, The Nation, Le Monde, The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at The Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco, The Taubman Museum of Art (VA), MAK Gallery (London) and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts (NY). Her work has been shown collectively at the MANIFESTA Biennale (Italy); Brighton Photo Biennial (UK); The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), and SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), among other institutions.
Barrayn was included in the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) Hundred Heroines. She is a 2017 African Great Lakes Reporting Fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation and a finalist for the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University.
She has given talks on her work at Yale University, Harvard University, The International Center of Photography, Tate Modern London, Rochester Institute of Technology, World Press Photo and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She has sat on judging panels for The Alexia Grant, Pictures of the Year International, Getty Images, The Aftermath Project and FotoEvidence.
Barrayn is co-author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, the first anthology in nearly 30 years that highlights photography produced by women of African descent. She is a member of Kamoinge, a pioneering collective of African American photographers founded in 1963. Barrayn holds a Master’s degree in Art Politics from New York University.
