Ali Zaraay is a visual artist and documentary photographer based in Cairo. He studied photojournalism and documentary photography at Hochschule Hannover, graduating in 2020. He then pursued a one-year liberal arts program at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences between 2021 and 2022. Zaraay has been enrolled in a residency program at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris since July 2023.

Between 2012 and 2016, Ali worked with photography as a press photographer for several Egyptian newspapers between 2012 and 2016. He has been working on Crawling on Dust since 2015.

Ali is interested in producing interactive installations and public exhibitions and has been engaged in curation and creative production projects. He recently founded the Safena 7 collective, which serves as a space for critical and multidisciplinary collective discussions around photography in Egypt. Ali’s current artworks are concerned with the changing city, demolition, construction and displacement. He believes in the importance of using contemporary multimedia, such as collage, installation, video, sound and web-documentary, as tools to complement his photography.