Camilla de Maffei

Photographer, she lived and worked in Barcelona, Spain, from 2001 to 2021.

Since 2022 she has been based in Milan.

Specializing in the Balkan region—where she has been active since 2009—she focuses her personal work on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, and Albania. There she has produced several long-term projects that explore, in different ways, the relationship between territory, identity, and memory.

Interested in exploring and expanding the boundaries of documentary photography, she employs a hybrid language that combines image and text, moving between anthropological observation and symbolic representation.

La Montagna Visibile, produced in Sarajevo between 2009 and 2012 in collaboration with anthropologist Caterina Borelli and funded by the CONCA (Consell Nacional d'Art i Cultura de Catalunya), received the Jury Prize, the Exchange Prize, and the Audience Award at the Les Boutographies festival (Montpellier). It was also a finalist in several international awards, including the Dorothea Lange-Taylor, the Voies Off award in Arles, and the Prix Pictet.

Delta, produced in Romania in the Danube Delta between 2014 and 2020, won the Premio Mallorca di Fotografia Contemporanea 2021.

Grande Padre, produced in Albania between 2018 and 2023 in collaboration with journalist Christian Elia, is one of the two winning projects of Fotografia Europea 2023.

In 2014, PDN – Photography District News of New York – named her among the year's 30 New and Emerging Photographers to Watch. In 2015 she was among the artists nominated for the Premio Cairo (Milan), an award dedicated to the best 20 Italian artists under 40.

She is the author of two books: Delta, published by Ediciones Anómalas in 2022, and Grande Padre, published by Milieu Edizioni in 2022.

Her projects have been exhibited and screened in galleries, festivals, and public spaces in various cities across Italy, France, Spain, and the USA.

In 2011, together with Catalan photographer Eugeni Gay Marin, she founded El Observatorio, a space for photographic creation and an educational workshop specializing in fine art photography and visual storytelling.