Alexandra Huddleston

Alexandra Huddleston (she/her) is a conceptual landscape photographer and installation artist whose interest in exploring landscape and culture in a wide array of global settings comes from her own international upbringing. She was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, and Bamako, Mali.

Huddleston’s early work in practice-based visual research dates to 2006, when she won a Fulbright Grant to live for a year in Timbuktu, Mali, photographing the city’s tradition of Islamic scholarship. Between 2009 and 2014, she walked thousands of kilometers on pilgrimage in Spain, France, and Japan, journeys that led to her current walking art practice. Residencies at Cow House Studios, 2016, Cill Rialaig, 2017, and Walking Birds’ Mountain II, 2019, have supported walks and research in Ireland. Work in Scotland has been supported by Common Ground, 2017, and work in the Netherlands by a masterclass at the Jan van Eyck Academie, 2019. Most recently, Alexandra completed a residency in Brussels at The Fondation Boghossian – Villa Empain during which she used walking and photography to explore the semiotics of urban parks.

Among other achievements, the US Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African Art, and the British Library have acquired Huddleston’s photographic prints. Notably, the landmark exhibition “West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song” at the British Library (2015) included photographs from “333 Saints.” Alexandra holds a Masters Of Letters In Fine Art Practice from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, an MS in journalism from Columbia University, USA, and a BA in studio art and East Asian studies from Stanford University, USA.

As Creative Director and Co-founder of the Kyoudai Press, she has published "Lost Things" (2012), "333 Saints: A Life of Scholarship in Timbuktu" (2013), "East or West: A Walking Journey Along Shikoku’s 88 Temple Pilgrimage" (2014), and "Vertigo" (2016).