Lara Baladi is an Egyptian-Lebanese artist, archivist and educator recognized internationally for her multidisciplinary works. Her artistic practice spans from photography, video, sculpture to architecture and multi-media installations. Informed by critical investigations into historical archives and the study of popular visual culture, Baladi’s work questions the theoretical divide between myth, memory, socio-political narratives and the cycles inherent to History.

Baladi received fellowships from the Japan Foundation (2003) and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab (2014). She was an artist-in-residence at MIT (Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence, 2015), MacDowell (New Hampshire, 2015), Art Omi (Ghent, New York, 2014) and VASL, (Karachi, Pakistan, 2010), amongst others.

Within her artistic practice, she is active in socially engaged projects. For more than twenty years, she has been on the board of directors of the Arab Image Foundation in Lebanon and the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Egypt. Ongoing since 2011, her media initiative Vox Populi: Tahrir Archives, includes a series of media initiatives (Tahrir Cinema), artworks, publications and an open source portal, Anatomy of Revolution, an ABC of Revolting, into web-based archives of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and other global social movements.

Baladi’s work has been published, exhibited and featured internationally—the Centre George Pompidou, (Paris, France, 2004), Transmediale, (Berlin, Germany, 2016), the Gwangju Biennial, (South Korea, 2018) to the Hasselblad Foundation, (Gothenburg, Sweden, 2021) and more recently, the first Cairo Art Fair at the new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). From 2016 to 2022, Lara Baladi has been a lecturer in MIT’s Program Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT). Currently, she is a Visiting Researcher at the CEDEJ, in Cairo, Egypt.