Emma Benany

An artist based in Cairo, Emma Benany was born in 1989, got into arts from a very early age and later studied Applied Sciences and Arts. Passing by many mediums from illustration, crafts to still and moving images, Emma got highly fascinated by the digital arts.

In 2008, she started exploring in the direction of digital interactivity and participated in diverse related workshops, projects and exhibitions with the attitude of blending art, design and computer science. By the end of 2009, she was chosen among 5 other artists to attend a master class of PureData and Arduino in the framework of the Open Lab Egypt project, a collaboration between Medrar for Contemporary Art and Hangar Spain.

In the mean time, she decided to go more in the direction of merging interactivity / digital art along with performance and dance, and to experiment in the topics related to glitch art, computer vision and motion tracking with keywords related to real vs. virtual, space vs. time and reality vs. perception.

Accordingly, Emma did her Bachelor of Arts in Digital Art and Performance and collaborated with many dancers and performers on experimenting and developing hybrid performances. Moreover, since 2010 she started participating in various contemporary dance workshops to understand more the human body as a medium.

Emma Benany during media lab with Renaud Vercey, Shaymaa Shoukry, .... in Cairo June 2011@zinc-dussollier

At the moment, Emma is doing art and design through hybrid media ranging from filmmaking, graphic design, video art, interactive art or design and media and performance. However, she would rather define herself as an artist and designer dealing with the medium that is mostly convenient to send the work’s message.

Some Emma Benany video works on vimeo