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Présentation de l'artiste

Ana Cecilia Leal

Born in the Northeast of Brazil and based in São Paulo, Ana Leal is an artist who works primarily with photography. Leal investigates ephemerality and impermanence through records of the minutiae of nature and everyday life. Her works dialogue with abstraction and have a strong conceptual and poetic charge. Leal is finalist of the 2025 Alpha Female award and Creative Open Competition at the Sony World

Photography Awards, a Gold Award winner at the 2020 TIFA and the 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Award Winner in the abstract category. She also received a Bronze Medal at the ND Awards 2021

and Honorable Mentions at the IPA 2021, Rotterdam Photo 2021, Prix de La Photographie Paris 2019, and The 15th Pollux Awards. She completed her MFA at the Miami International University of

Arts and Design (2018) and the Professional Photography Course at the Pan-American School in São Paulo (2013). Her work is part of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts - FMoPA collection.

She also works as content editor for South America on the international online platform Lenscratch.

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Artist statement

With a distinctly female gaze, my work explores themes of ephemerality, fragility, and impermanence, weaving together records of nature and everyday life. Influenced by Impressionism and expanded photography, my work engages with abstraction, carries a strong conceptual appeal and also poetic charge. In each project, I push the boundaries of photography by integrating diverse techniques and materials. This approach imbues my work with a tangible sense of organicity and materiality, transforming photography into a multidimensional exploration of memory, time, and existence. I am presenting now my ongoing project entitled "Chão de Histórias" ( Ground of Stories ), where I explore the relationship between territory and family history by recognizing roots and seeds that transcend generations. The work is based on a mirroring between humans and the land, highlighting the construction of a genuine sense of identity and belonging through artistic gestures that weave together past and present, emphasizing both transformations and continuities. The project consists of three bodies of work, comprising: landscape and vegetation photographs taken by me at the backlands of Pernambuco State in northeastern Brazil, appropriated portraits from my father’s family archive, and materials such as lace and clay. For the Kamira Photo award 2025 I am submitting two of the series, as follows: “Dobra do Tempo” ( Fold of Time ) presents collages composed of landscapes captured by me in 2022 in the regions of Floresta and Vale do Catimbau, Brazil, combined with hand cut landscape images from my family archive and Renaissance lace a local tradition introduced to Brazil in the 19th century by French nuns and later passed on to Indigenous women. These collages establish a continuity of forms between these three “materials,” weaving a superimposition of times. "Encontro" ( Encounter )brings together portraits of my paternal grandmother’s distant ancestors and clay, representing the dry, sandy soil of the region. It is a kind of synthesis of my origins and the central premise of "Chão de Histórias” : we are one with the land that holds our roots and seeds.

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