Sarah Waiswa is a Ugandan-born, Kenya-based award-winning documentary and portrait photographer whose work explores contemporary social issues from her unique perspective as an African woman. With academic training in sociology and psychology, she left a corporate career to pursue photography full-time, using her practice to challenge reductive narratives and reimagine how African lives are seen, remembered, and understood.
Her photography often centers on themes of memory, womanhood, grief, and self-expression, with a particular focus on telling nuanced stories of African women, stories often absent from mainstream archives. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including most recently in Africa Fashion at the Brooklyn Museum, and featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and others. She has also collaborated with global brands including Christian Dior and Chloé.
Sarah’s early photographic work emerged from an interest in how young Africans were embracing their identities with renewed pride particularly through self-presentation, fashion, and the digital space, which allowed for broader access and cultural exchange. Her ongoing interest in youth culture and Nairobi’s vibrant subcultures continues to inform her visual practice.
In 2021, she founded African Women in Photography, a non-profit organization that supports and celebrates the work of women and non-binary photographers from the continent through mentorship, education, and visibility. In 2023, she curated her first exhibition, Sisi Ni Hao, at the Goethe-Institut in Nairobi with support from the Ford Foundation bringing together 12 East African women photographers to reflect on womanhood from their own perspectives.
She continues to expand her curatorial practice while creating new photographic work that reflects her lived experience, interested in how identity, resistance, and storytelling shape both how we see ourselves and how we are seen.
