Zanele Muholi is a South African visual activist.

For over a decade she has documented black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’s lives in various townships in South Africa. Responding to the continuing discrimination and violence faced by the LGBTI community.  In a more recent ongoing series, MaID (My Identity) or, read differently, “maid”, Muholi becomes both the participant and the image-maker, as she turns the camera on herself. Experimenting with different characters and archetypes, Muholi’s self-portraits reference specific events in South Africa’s political history. Through exaggerating the darkness of her skin tone, Muholi reclaims her blackness, and offsets the culturally dominant images of black women in the media today.