Documentary photographer Sonja Hamad was born in 1986 in Damascus, Syria, to Kurdish Yazidi parents. When she was three years old, her family moved to a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Sonja lived there until finishing school. During the following two years, she worked as a creative assistant for a commercial photographer in Hamburg.
Sonja studied photography at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin from 2009 to 2013 and graduated with the portrait thesis
“Wenn’s drauf ankommt” (“When it counts”). Because of the upcoming war, she could not travel to Syria to research her subsequent project. As a result, she continued the work in Germany.
Searching and tracing identity between foreignness and belonging led to portraits of family members, friends, and strangers. During this project the quest for cultural identity became a subject of personal and intimate relevance to Sonja instead of being primarily considered politically.
In 2013 she started the project “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi – Frauen, Leben, Freiheit – die kurdischen Freiheitskämpferinnen”
(“Jin, Jiyan, Azadi – Women, Life, Freedom – the Kurdish Freedom Fighters”), which was explicitly intended to be political. Based on contacts stemming from her portrait-project, and thanks to a scholarship from the VG Bildkunst, she was able to take her documentary work to Northern Iraq in March 2015 followed by a trip to the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) in Northern Syria and a second stay in September 2015. The ongoing project also entailed a third journey in the middle of October 2016.
Sonja Hamad lives and works in Berlin, where she is also acting as a freelance photographer for a range of high-quality magazines and various private and professional clients.
