Mariam Ghani

Mariam Ghani (Pashto/Dari: مریم غنی; born 1978) is an American visual artist, photographer, filmmaker and social activist. A member of the Visual Arts faculty at Bennington College, Ghani is the collaborator and partner of Chitra Ganesh and is represented by Ryan Lee Gallery. Her work has been featured in venues like the Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Art, and she has produced several projects including Index of the Disappeared as well as films like Like Water From a Stone and What We Left Unfinished.

Early life and education Mariam Ghani was born in 1978 in Brooklyn, New York to an Afghan father and a Lebanese mother. Her father, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, served as the president of Afghanistan from 2014 to 2021. Her mother, Rula Saade, is a Lebanese citizen. Living in the suburbs of Maryland, Ghani grew up in exile and was unable to travel to Afghanistan until 2002 when she was age 24.

Work Ghani sees her use of digital media and technology as a toolkit for creating her art. Much of her work has a political component and speaks to systemic inequality in social and economic systems, and she considers herself both a women's rights and human rights activist. From 2004–2005, she was an Eyebeam resident. Since 2018, Ghani has been a member of the Visual Arts Faculty at Bennington College. It serves as a record of the United States' post-9/11 detention of immigrants and the American public's subsequent reaction to it. The project has grown and evolved over time, leading to a short film titled How Do You See the Disappeared? as well as a web project. Other materials include transcripts, scraps of video, and radio clips.

In addition to her visual art works, Ghani works as a journalist, specifically writing and lecturing on issues affecting the Afghan diaspora. She is also an archivist who has worked to digitize and re-image works produced by Afghan state filmmakers from 1978–1991 during the country's Communist period. Additionally, she commented that Radio Television Afghanistan has an "amazingly rich archive of audiovisual material deserving of wider attention."