Les Femmes Du Maroc Tapa dura - 2009

Lalla Essaydi received a BFA from Tufts University in 1999 and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in 2003. Essaydi's most recent work uses analog photography, but she also works in oil on canvas, mixed media, and video. The author of Converging Territories (powerHouse Books, 2005), Essaydi has exhibited at Edwynn Houk Gallery and Laurence Miller Gallery, New York; Schneider Gallery, Chicago; Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston; the Fries Museum, the Netherlands; the Art Institute of Chicago; The New Britain Museum of Art; the Columbus Museum of Art; The National Museum of Singapore; and the Danish Center for Culture and Development, Denmark, among others. Essaydi was born in Morocco and currently lives in New York.

Fatema Mernissi is a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist. She has done research for UNESCO and ILO, published articles on women in Morocco and in Islam at large, and written books including The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Islam (Basic Books, 1992) and Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Addison-Wesley, 1994).