Virginie Ellis is a French, Dubai-based fine-art photographer whose work explores the sculptural dialogue between light, shadow, and sand, where landscapes become emotional territories. In 2024, she won the Second Prize at HIPA (Sustainability) for “Towards a Bright Future.”

She began photographing at the age of 15, and this early practice became the foundation of a contemplative approach to image-making: a way of slowing down, listening, and translating silence into form. Working at the intersection of abstraction and reality, she creates photographs that invite the viewer into stillness, resonance, and introspection.

Her visual language is shaped by subtle shifts of tone, texture, and luminosity, often with a painterly sensibility, using the camera like a brush. Black and white remains a lasting anchor in her work, drawn to depth, contrast, and the vibration of detail.

After many years in Paris, she moved to Dubai in 2020, where the desert’s vast minimalism and surreal atmosphere refined her signature aesthetic, minimal, sensorial, and sometimes abstract. Her work seeks the moment when matter becomes emotion, and when light turns into a form of storytelling.

Her photographs have been shown in group exhibitions and galleries including Alliance Française, Zidoun-Bossuyt, and Noor Royal Gallery. Selected for Xposure 2026 (Sharjah), she will present a dedicated selection of 25 works from her UAE desert series in January 2026. At Xposure, she will also give an artist talk and premiere a short film that extends her desert series into moving image. She was shortlisted for HIPA’s COP28 (2023) and Power (2025) competitions, and continues to develop bodies of work celebrating the UAE’s landscapes and the quiet power of their light.