Virginie Ellis is a French, Dubai-based fine-art photographer whose work explores the sculptural dialogue between light, shadow and sand.

She uses photography to express her emotions, infusing beauty, harmony and poetry into ordinary scenes.

For her, photography is a meditative act where stillness and emotion converge, and presence becomes a quiet spiritual journey. Deeply connected to nature since childhood, she draws inspiration from the quiet rhythm of the natural world. Her images lie at the intersection of abstraction, reality, and storytelling, inviting viewers to slow down and enter spaces of stillness, resonance, and introspection.

Much of her work plays with light, colors, shades, and textures, giving her images a vivid, painting-like effect, using her camera as a brush. Her love for black and white photography also remains a major source of inspiration as well.

After many years in Paris, she moved to Dubai in 2020, where the desert’s stunning landscape and surreal atmosphere shaped a minimalist, sometimes abstract, visual language. Her photographs seek the moment when textures become poetry.

Her work has been shown in group exhibitions and at galleries including Alliance Française, Zidoun-Bossuyt and Noor Royal Gallery. She will exhibit at Xposure in Sharjah in January 2026.
She received Second Prize in HIPA’s 2024 Sustainability category for “Towards a Bright Future”, and was shortlisted for HIPA’s COP28 (2023) and Power (2025) competitions. She continues to develop series celebrating the landscapes of the UAE and the quiet power of their light.