Theresa Traore Dahlberg

Theresa Traore Dahlberg is a visual artist and filmmaker who formulates and mediates engaging and complex narratives through sculpture, photography, and film. Her sculptural works often take a point of departure in the material itself, as a physical material and as a container of histories, ideas, and notions. The artist pays attention to production, working conditions, workers’ identities and personal stories, creating art that reflects the complexity of class, women's roles, and post-colonialism. Her films narrate stories in the expanded field of documentary including themes such as representation of the other, by questioning how individuals, events and places are perceived, interpreted and understood. Traore Dahlberg draws from her own experiences of being anchored in two political and social cultures, Sweden and Burkina Faso, and from the implication of living in a contemporary European context.

Traore Dahlberg (b.1983 in Sweden, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden) studied 16mm experimental film at the New School, in New York and at the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts. Later she studied Visual Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Traore Dahlberg has had solo exhibitions in venues such as Institut Suédois, Paris, Musée National du Burkina Faso and most recently at Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden in 2021.  She received Beckers Art Award in 2019, which entailed two large solo-exhibitions at Färgfabriken Stockholm and Höganäs Museum, Höganäs, Sweden. She has been awarded the Tempo Documentary Short Award for her film The Ambassador’s wife (2018) which was also shown at the Toronto Film festival, Tiff, Berlin, Clerement ISFF, Telluride and Artist Films International, Bonniers Konsthall, Whitechapel and more. Her first film Taxi Sister (2011) was about the everyday life of a Senegalese female taxi driver, and her film Ouaga Girls (2017) was her first feature-length documentary.