Amira Ziyan (Arabic: أميرة زيان; born October 16, 1977) is an Israeli Druze photography artist and art teacher.
Early life.
Ziyan was born into a traditional Druze family in the village of Yarka, Israel. Both of her parents were religious. Ziyan has seven brothers and three sisters. As a child, she faced many restrictions as a woman, but despite these limitations, she decided to pursue higher education.
In 1999, she graduated as an industrial chemistry engineer from the Western Galilee College in Acre. In 2003, she received a teaching certificate in administration from the Weizmann Institute in Haifa.
In 2004, her father suffered a stroke. Her brother, who owned a photo development laboratory, was forced to replace her father at the concrete factory and asked her to help him in the photo shop. Working in the photo shop sparked her interest in the field and encouraged her to pursue it further. In 2007, she began studying for a bachelor's degree in art and French at the University of Haifa, which she completed in 2010. She continued her studies with a master's degree in art from the University of Haifa, which she completed in 2012.
During her academic studies, she excelled in photography and won prizes and grants, including the Sa'ar Afroni Artist Grant in 2008, the Spielmann Prize for Photography Students from the Spielmann Institute in Tel Aviv in 2009, and an award for outstanding achievement in her thesis from Friends of the University of Haifa in 2010. After completing her studies, she continued to work in the field of photography. She has been highly praised for her artistic achievements and has won numerous awards, including the Encouragement Prize for Plastic Arts from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport in 2017, the Becky Dakel Commendation from the Association for Women's and Gender Research in 2020, and the Oscar Handler Prize from Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot in 2022.
Her works are included in collections such as the Israeli Knesset, the Haifa Museum of Art, the Umm al-Fahm Art Gallery, the Alexander Tutsek Foundation in Munich, and in private collections.
Between 2012 and 2024, she was a member of a joint Jewish-Arab cooperative gallery in Kabrie, she was a member of the judging panel at the International Photography Festival 2021, member and committee for the study of women and gender 2023, Member of the Interdisciplinary Arts Vocational Committee of the Ministry of Education 2024, member of the rotating exhibitions committee at the Faculty of Medicine, Hewbrew University 2024 and a member of the Druze culture section 2024 
Artistic practice.
Ziyan primarily engages in staged photography, with a particular focus on portraits of individuals and the creation of portraits through the arrangement of objects and the construction of environments devoid of human subjects. Her photographs frequently document women within contemporary Druze society. In her works, Ziyan explores themes related to socio-cultural identity within the Druze community and gender-related issues in her surrounding environment. Ziyan’s work places a strong emphasis on questions that center around the concept of “culture” as an aesthetic category for examining and understanding the society in which she operates. The artistic and aesthetic realm provides an opportunity for reconciliation between nature and humanity, creating space for voices that are not given expression in other discursive spaces.
In her 2016 exhibition "Bare Concrete" at the Kabrie Gallery, Ziyan presented 12 photographs in various formats. In this carefully staged series, in which she is simultaneously present, absent, and deceptive, Ziyan leads us into her conflicted yet surprisingly complete inner world. Air and concrete intertwine and compete in an encounter that seems possible only in her world. The figure of the father, who was the most influential and significant figure in Amira's life, is present and runs like a common thread throughout all the works, even if he is not visible, as in the work depicting a portrait of a young girl against a concrete background. Concrete, in its various shades, appears as a recurring motif in the photographs and raises questions about the permanent and the temporary, about memory and forgetting. These works raise the question of whether concrete is merely a thin and unstable layer of a few centimeters or reinforced concrete built as a stable foundation.
In 2017, Ziyan presented a joint exhibition, "Huna and Hunak," with designer Rami Tareef at the Kabrie Gallery. In this exhibition, she isolated ordinary daily actions attributed to women, removed them from their context, and thus transformed them into a kind of encrypted ritual with an aura of sanctity and mystery.
In 2018, she presented a solo exhibition, "Crystal Palace," at the Umm al-Fahm Art Gallery. In this exhibition, Ziyan chose to focus on dialogues with Druze women, some of whom were close to her and others whom she had recently met. Ziyan asked questions and listened to the women's experiences in their youth and adulthood, in their lives as singles and as married women, as daughters, mothers, and partners. Her impressions led her to the visual image - to photography, through which she channels these things and realizes them in a unique photographic language. Both experientially and conceptually, the works illustrate the creative process itself, the transition from the spoken story to the image as a new, condensed, and poetic visual reality.
In 2021, Ziyan delved into the subject of reincarnation. Her exhibition "Beyond the Body," presented at the Wilfrid Israel Museum, was another step in Ziyan's artistic journey, with her photographs revealing hidden layers in her immediate surroundings. Staged photography allows her to control its components and create a hidden space of both presence and absence. The sense of illusion evoked by the image is evident from the very first photograph in the exhibition, which shows a transparent figure seeming to dissipate towards a closed gate, inviting the viewer to follow in its footsteps towards an unknown reality. The series of works dealt with the phenomenon of reincarnation, a deeply rooted belief prevalent in the Druze community, to which Ziyan belongs. The Arabic term for reincarnation, "Takamus," means changing clothes, and it expresses the attitude towards the human body as a temporary vessel for the soul, which is born again and again. Ziyan's photographs are based on stories of remembrance that she collected among members of the Druze community. Most of them had sought in their childhood to meet members of their families from a previous incarnation and had managed to identify them and locate significant personal objects in a place that was known only to them and their family members in previous lives.