Silvia Rosi

Rosi explores memory, migration, and self-representation through an autobiographical practice shaped by her Togolese heritage and her family’s history between West Africa and Italy.

Drawing on the visual traditions of West African studio photography, Rosi frequently turns the camera on herself, using self-portraiture, performance, and staged image-making to inhabit and reconstruct personal and inherited histories. Family photographs, oral testimonies, and intergenerational narratives become points of departure for examining matrilineality, women’s labour, and the ways identity is carried, remembered, and transformed across generations and geographies. Her acclaimed series Encounter (2019–20), developed following the Jerwood/Photoworks Award, retraced her parents’ migration from Togo to Italy through fictionalised reconstructions of her family album.

Rosi received a BA in Photography from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, in 2016. She has been the recipient of the C/O Berlin Talent Award (2024), MAST Grant (2024), V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography (2024), Royal Photographic Society Vic Odden Award (2021), Foam Talent Award (2021), and Jerwood/Photoworks Award (2019).

Recent exhibitions include Protektorat at C/O Berlin (2025); Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025); Disintegrata at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (2024); In the Now: Gender and Nation in Europe at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2024); and Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense at MAXXI, Rome (2022). Her work is held in institutional collections including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia; C/O Berlin Foundation; Autograph, London; and Vontobel Art Collection.