bio

Shaza Tarig (b. 1998) is a photographer and visual artist from the Greater Toronto Area. Her work explores migration and belonging through the perspective of a Sudanese-Aswani immigrant. Working primarily with portraiture and documentary photography, she traces how Afro-Arab identities are shaped by displacement, hybridity, and anti-Blackness across the Global North and South.

Shaza’s images take shape through slow, collaborative processes. They are rooted in relationships, conversation, and shared authorship. She is interested in how people choose to be seen when given time, trust, and control. In the studio, she pays close attention to posture, gesture, and gaze. In her environmental work, she documents how culture lives in the everyday—how people dress, move, gather, and rest.

Her work is deeply informed by personal and political loss, as well as the connective power of progression. Her family’s displacement from Aswan and Sudan left stories that were either lost or deliberately erased. Through her practice, she holds space for what remains, what is reimagined and rebuilt, and what is still searching for form.

She explores how youth and elders from Southern Egypt and Sudan navigate between tradition and change, and how Afro-diasporic communities carry, adapt, and rearticulate their sense of home and cultural identity across generations.

Her images do not rush to explain. Instead, they accept and find lightness in the politics of identity and belonging. For her, photography is not just a way to represent. It is a way to ask questions and make visible what often goes unseen.

contact
for personal work or commissions please contact shazatariig@gmail.com
(she/they)

SHAZA TARIG