Co-founder

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Heba Farid is an artist, curator, researcher and educator in photography, based in Cairo. She is co-founder of TINTERA gallery, Cairo, which opened in 2019 and is Egypt’s first photography dedicated gallery.

She has a background in architecture from Canada and the USA, and has taught photography in the Visual Arts program at the American University in Cairo.
She is a founding member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), a Cairo based art centre dedicated to the visual image, operating since 2004.

Both independently and as the former coordinator of the photographic heritage program for CULTNAT, a satellite of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, she has curated and collaborated on exhibitions based on historic photograph collections.

She has participated in and published articles for several regional symposiums and journals on archiving and Egypt’s photographic heritage. She is a contributing author for the monograph by Xenia Nikolskaya entitled DUST: Egypt’s Forgotten Architecture, 2022 (AUCPress), for PhotoResearcher, Journal of the European Society for the History of Photography special issue on The City and the Territory: Imagining Cairo and Egypt (2017) and The Journal of the Arab Council for Social Sciences issue on Gendering the Arab Archive (Oct 2025).

Having received professional training in preservation and management of photograph collections, she is an alumni of the Middle East Photograph Preservation Initiative. Her current research project is archiving an early 20th century Egyptian female performer and is supported by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library for 2025-26 in collaboration with the Rare Books and Special Collections Library of the American University in Cairo.

She has participated in selection juries for World Press Photo, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and other institutions.