Sabiha Çimen is a self-taught photographer whose practice explores female identity as a dynamic, ongoing process of self-fashioning. Focusing on Muslim girls and women, her portraits and still lifes blend documentary realism with poetic surrealism to trace how identity is continuously expressed, negotiated, and asserted through everyday life. Moving beyond narratives and stereotypes of oppression and victimhood, Çimen portrays how faith, community and gender intertwine in Islamic culture as women navigate both patriarchal constraints and Western feminist assumptions of agency. Her images resist a ‘finished’ womanhood, instead celebrating the freedom to reinvent, adapt and self-define on one’s own terms.
Çimen’s work has been exhibited at c/o Berlin (2025), International Center of Photography (2025) and Kunsthal Rotterdam (2023), and appeared in publications, such as The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. She has received numerous awards including, the Women Photographers Grant, PH Museum (2018); Light Work Artist Residency (2020); W. Eugene Smith Grant (2020); Canon Female Photojournalist Grant (2020); and the World Press Photo, Long-Term Projects (2020). For her debut book, Hafiz (2021), she received the Paris Photo/Aperture First PhotoBook Award. Çimen is a member of Magnum Photos.
