Zanele Muholi was born in 1972 in Umlazi, Durban, South Africa. Working in photography, video, and installation, for over a decade she has documented the lives of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people in various townships in South Africa. Responding to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTI community, in 2006 Muholi embarked on an ongoing project, Faces, and Phases, in which they depict black lesbian and transgender individuals. Muholi’s self-proclaimed mission is "to re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in SA and beyond." In a more recent ongoing series, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), Muholi becomes both the participant and the image-maker, as they turn the camera on themselves. Experimenting with different characters and archetypes, Muholi’s self-portraits reference specific events in South Africa’s political history. Through exaggerating the darkness of her skin tone, Muholi reclaims their blackness and offsets the culturally dominant images of black women in the media today. Muholi has exhibited her work globally and her work is in the permenant
collections of numerous presitious public collection such as, Art Institute of Chicago, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Tate Modern.