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| Ejatu Shaw |
This week, Globacom-sponsored African Voices on CNN International shines a spotlight on Ejatu Shaw, the London-based photographer and multidisciplinary artist transforming cultural heritage into breathtaking visual poetry.
Born in 1996, Shaw honed her skills at the University of Westminster, graduating with a Master’s in Photography Arts in 2020.
But her artistic spark ignited earlier, during a 2013 family trip to Sierra Leone, where a creative epiphany, like light piercing a tight lens, launched her journey of deep, introspective storytelling.
Her oeuvre is a delicate tapestry, interweaving strands of Islamic faith with the vibrant textures of African heritage.
Echoes of the great studio photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Malick Sidibé, Sory Sanlé, and Omar Yahia Barram, resonate subtly within her compositions, like ancestral voices carried on a visual wind.
From these influences, Shaw has cultivated a practice rooted in memory and self-inquiry, a press statement from the program sponsors states. Through self-portraiture and conceptually layered projects, she transforms personal recollections into images that speak with both intimacy and universality, mirrors in which the past and present quietly converge, the statement explains.
Her ascent has been both swift and assured, it added, stressing that in 2025, the British Fashion Council named her a New Wave Creative, affirming her place among a new generation of cultural vanguards. In the same year, her lens captured figures of global renown, including Angela Bassett for EBONY, Cynthia Erivo for The Guardian, Sunday Times and Vogue, and Usain Bolt for Puma, the statement maintains.
She also conceived and shot the album cover for Craig David—each frame a testament to her evolving visual language.
African Voices airs on Saturdays at 7:30am. and 11:00am., with further broadcasts on Sunday at 3:30am. and 6:00pm., and repeat transmissions on Monday at 3:00am. and 5:45pm, an invitation to witness, through Shaw’s eyes, a world where identity is not fixed, but fluid, luminous, and ever unfolding.
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