Kemet's Daughters - Contemporary Egyptian Female Animators

Illustration is an important part of Egypt’s culture and history, Ancient Egyptians were masters of it, we have learned a lot from the painted images on the murals of ancient temples and tombs.

Sequential images in murals and hieroglyphs hinted at early animation endeavours, and Some of the tombs are a clear prove of that, such as the daily life scenes in Mera (or Mereruka) and Ptah Hotep tombs, at Saqqara.

But the most amazing example is at Beni Hassan tombs in El Menya, where we can see wrestling scenes painted in sequential, and we can easily imagine it moving.

Egypt was the first Arab and African country to establish an animation production. In 1934, David and Frankel Herschel created the character of Mish-Mish Effendi, in their film Nothing to Do, and he became a national star.

Since 1960, the Egyptian television was considered the main producer for animation series in Egypt, an entire generation of Egyptian animators worked in it, such as Ali and Hossam Moheeb, Samee’ Rafe’, Mohamed Haseeb, Noshi Iskandar, and Zakariyya Ajlan.

It is really difficult for Egyptian animators to find independent funding for their work, or establish their own production company, but in the beginning of the 1990s two female Egyptian animators decided to break this rule, Mona Abu Abou El Nasr and Zainab Zamzam.

Abou El Nasr’s Cairo Cartoon Studio became a leading animation studio in the Middle East, and she created many popular Egyptian animation characters, such as the Nubian boy Bakkar, and

Sindbad the Sailor, While Zamzam established her company Zamzam Media and she became famous by her Islamic-themed clay animation.

Many Contemporary Egyptian female animators are trying to find their way now, despite the lake of funding for animation production, and some of them were able to succeed not only on national level but also internationally. /Mona Sheded, kuratorka programu/

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