We recently connected with Ania Moussawel and have shared our conversation below.

Ania, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

When I became a mom, finding the balance between my work and home life, and a creative practice was very challenging. I eventually found a way to produce art consistently again and those life events left an imprint on the work that followed. My current project, “The Days are Long” is a series of photographs that center around my daughter, mother, grandmother, and myself. The images in this project examine themes of motherhood, identity, and more specifically, the complex relationship between mother and daughter over generations in my family. The title of the series comes from the saying, “The days are long, but the years are short”. Meant to be words of comfort for overwhelmed parents, I heard or read some version of this phrase often after becoming a mom.

Work from this series has been shown in venues including Filter Photo, MDC Gallery of Art & Design, Photographic Center Northwest, Masur Museum of Art, and most recently in a solo show at Soho Photo Gallery in New York City. I currently have a piece from this series on view at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA through September 4th.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am an artist and educator born and raised in Miami, FL. Growing up, I loved art and knew I would study something in the creative field, but was not sure exactly what that
would be until I took my first photography class at MDC, where I took a basic black and white darkroom class. My first rolls of film were fogged, and my first prints turned out black. Even then, I loved it, so I kept trying. Ultimately, I got a BFA in photography at Barry University in Miami Shores and an MFA in Photo, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York. The mentorship I received at the schools I attended are crucial to my teaching and artistic practice. I’ll always be grateful for those opportunities and to the people who mentored and supported me along the way, including my colleagues, friends, family and husband, Francisco Aguila who is also a photographer. I began teaching after I received my BFA and have been teaching for 13 years now.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Having the opportunity to do what I love every day is the most rewarding aspect for me. In one way or another, I am doing something with photography–whether I’m working on my own photography or helping my students hone their camera skills, I spend a good part of my day talking, thinking about photography. As a teacher, I get to introduce my students this art form that is part of their everyday life but from a totally different perspective.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.aniamoussawel.com
• Instagram: photographsareeverywhere
• Facebook: aniamoussawel