ebba ZAJMI
ZAJMI is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and educator. Their creative practice deconstructs the family home as a bodymind, intergenerational patternmaking in failing surveillance states, and interclass, cross-cultural contact in public and private spaces.
ZAJMI completed an apprenticeship with the Feminist Press and an internship with Ugly Duckling Presse, where they supported editorial, copyedit, design, and community engagement work. They’ve faciliated workshops in traditional and non-traditional formats alike, most recently offering exhibition or book fair related workshops at Kurimanzutto Gallery in Chelsea and Bulevard Art and Media Institute in Tirana.
They are currently pursuing a second graduate degree in writing.
DHE VETEN NDERO
MATERIALE TË PËRZGJEDHURA
FEBRUARY 20, 2026 — MARCH 05, 2026
CURATED BY CARLA LIESCHING, FAYE PAMINTUAN, AND MELAINA THOMPSON
WITH CORNELL AAP
What is a book, exactly?
Bookmaker and artist, Dayanita Singh, writes that “a book is a conversation with a stranger in the future.” In other words, a book is not simply a medium to convey information, but rather a conduit for human connection, an enduring form that brings people together in ways both real and imaginary.
Like Singh, we contend that a book is a relational tool, extending far beyond the boundaries of the material object itself. A book is a meeting place, containing multiple spaces in time, images, words, and whole pages waiting to be activated.
This book, which started as a close collaboration with Angel Hubris in diaspora, connected both Hubris and Zajmi to expansive friendships and community back in their home country of Albania, where the two found themselves among groups of cultural and political workers gathering around books from the Balkans and beyond. This book then became a tool for connection across diaspora.
This recent inclusion of the book in a collective exhibition at the Bibliowicz Gallery brings the work back to its roots in a way. This work was displayed alongside the work of Zajmi’s peers, mentors, collaborators, and friends from the Ithaca schools that shaped their understanding of image-text work and books.
The book that once reached back for a homeland now makes a home in Ithaca, where the editor and designer was shaped by and formed new kinds of families between 2020 and 2022. The book will remain in the Tjaden collection of books at Cornell University.
ONE IN A SET OF THREE BROADSIDES
BY IMAGE TEXT ITHACA PRESS
EDITED WITH TONYA FOSTER
PRINTED BY GRAFICHE VENEZIANE
LAUNCHED AT PRINTED MATTER NYC
FALL 2022 | ACROSS BORDERS
The publication, and the set of three broadsides, was designed by Elana Schlenker. They launched at the Printed Matter Art Book Fair in New York City in October 2022 after being printed in Venezia, Italy.
* = PUBLICATION CREDIT APPEARS UNDER AN ALTERNATE NAME
WITH VALENTINA BONIZZI & SILVI NAÇI
19 MAJ 2025 | TIRANA, ALBANIA
A Reservoir of Care, Love, Rebellion is a proposal for commons shared between local and diasporic communities through art, activism, and the archive.
This is the fourth edition, curated by Valentina Bonizzi and Silvi Naçi, organized and produced by Bulevard Art & Media Institute in partnership with Aleanca LGBTQI, Homespace, and Sekhmet Institute.
The work is a set of three still-life images of living documents in which the artist is working with memory materials and ephemera collected from a migration story starting in August of 2000. The work was made while contending with the mythologies and failures of both state and family.
After building and living with an altar dedicated to the objects that tracked Zajmi’s family in diaspora–from immigration documents in Ziploc bags to severed hair and Turkish coffee cups–the artist wrapped the altar and put it away between 2022 and 2024. In 2024, the altar was unraveled and dismantled, allowing the artist to rearrange and re-envision what they call the “memory keepers” of their family’s American dream.
A private artist talk and discussion called “Looking For Signs, Living With Images” was held with Aleanca LGBTQI before the exhibition.
AN INDEPENDENT BOOK FAIR
AT BULEVARD ART AND MEDIA INSTITUTE
30 NOVEMBER 2024 | TIRANA, ALBANIA
Writing the Image was offered to international and multilingual participants during An Independent Book Fair in 2024.
The particular history of the Albanian photograph was an inspiration in the planning of this workshop. Both the Marubi archives (an incredible multi-generational archive of Albanian photographs) and Hoxha’s habits of erasure acted as primary points of center.
What happened in the room, thanks to the presence of participants from different backgrounds, activated conversations around how we relate to images and histories of image-making that span across cultures, disciplines, and political histories.
FOR ABETARE (NOISY CLASSROOM)
EXHIBITED WORK BY PETRIT HALILAJ
PROGRAMMING CURATED BY ERIOLA PIRA
AT KURIMANZUTTO GALLERY IN CHELSEA
19 OCTOBER 2024 | NEW YORK CITY
Zhgarravina (Scribble) was the third and final workshop of programming linked to Petrit Hahlilaj’s Abetare (Noisy Classroom) at kurimanzutto Gallery, the sister exhibition to his 2024 Met Rooftop Commission.
The programming for the Chelsea exhibition at kurimanzutto was curated by Eriola Pira of The Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
From identifying and naming figures, words, and marks on the school desks to the sculptures Petrit Halilaj extracted from them, participants were guided through making their marks and creating collectively authored broadsheets.
Though Zajmi shares a Kosovar ancestry with the artist, it is a generation or two removed, meaning their parents and grandparents were direct subjects of the Hoxha regime. During that regime, the broadside was specifically encouraged as a state-sponsored tactic of social surveillance and shame, carried out by civilians in various neighborhoods.
Zajmi wanted to engage that complex political history with the ancient human urge towards mark-making and the idea of publishing as a public good. They invited participants—who were a mixture of Albanian and non-Albanian speakers—to subvert that history and make collectively authored broadsides linked to memory, language, childlike imagination, joy, and play.
IMAGES & TEXT BY ANGEL HUBRIS
EDITORIAL & DESIGN BY EBBA ZAJMI
PRINTED IN PHILADELPHIA
LAUNCHED IN TIRANA, ALBANIA
28 NOVEMBER 2024 | ACROSS BORDERS
A Bird’s Neck for Lunch by Angel Hubris is a horror story and a homecoming in book form, with writing and images by Angel Hubris–our author and narrator.
Angel Hubris ponders prey and prayer, capital and cruelty and country, homecoming and horror, ritual and remains, bells and burial.
This work was launched at An Independent Book Fair (with 28 November and Bulevard Art and Media Institute) in Tirana, Albania in 2024.
You can purchase your copy from the author here.
02 DECEMBER 2024 | NEW YORK CITY
Fields is the third studio album Data 91. The album is a larger interdisciplinary work featuring sound, video, and text.
Ingredients: liner notes, recycled images, plenty of time to ruminate. Curated by Studio Zajmi for your reading and viewing pleasure.
& GROUP EXHIBITION
AT ESSEX FLOWERS GALLERY
BY IMAGE TEXT ITHACA PRESS
CURATED & DESIGNED BY PAUL SOULELLIS
SUMMER & FALL 2022 | NEW YORK CITY
Featured Artists: Ebba Zajmi*, Saxon Baird, Raegan Bird, Cinthya Santos Briones, Robert Contreras II, Nan Heyneman, Kole Kovacs, Jared Lindahl, Hyacinth Schukis, Dale Small, and John Smieska.
* = PUBLICATION CREDIT APPEARS UNDER AN ALTERNATE NAME
Soulellis also curated the group show, an accompanying exhibition and manifestation of the artists’ work in installation form, at Essex Flowers Gallery with the artists in August of 2022. The exhibition featured a reading series during its run.
Fed on pattern, inheritance, transformation and the inexpressible, the snake eats itself. The beginning is the end is the beginning. Suggested usage: four drops daily. A sensation of warmth is normal.
FOR AN INDEPENDENT BOOKFAIR IN TIRANA
NOVEMBER 2024 | TIRANA, ALBANIA
These image-text postcards were printed specifically for the 2024 independent book fair in Tirana. Limited copies remain. Free shipping anywhere in the US.
Postcard 001 features a coffee reading ritual on the front with excerpted text from “The Fortune Teller,” fully published in Sisters (DDRC), on the back.
Postcard 002 features a night cemetery photo from Berlin, 2021, with the unpublished poem “Call It a Birthday” on the back.
Postcard 003 features a photograph of a man riding a bicycle on Rruga e Kavajës in Tirana, one of the oldest streets in the city. The surrounding landscape’s mountains, mostly visible only decades ago, are blocked by large buildings. The back features an excerpt from the poem, “Nan’ Tiranë,” previously published in full by Oranbeg Press.
BY DADA DUENDE RECORD CLUB
FALL 2024 | INTERNATIONAL
DDRC Volume Five: Sisters features work by various artists including Ebba Zajmi, Cinthya Santos Briones, Dawn Yow, and Cornell Watson. The cover design was done by Letra Muerta Inc. in Brooklyn, and this issue was co-curated by Faride Mereb.
These interventions into the family archive intertwine with the divination rituals that shaped, intersected with, and sometimes plagued the artist’s childhood–an experience only shared with, remembered with, and understood by the artist’s sibling–a sister.
No, Dear (Brooklyn, New York)
Porridge Magazine (London, England)
O Gocë (London by way of Albania & Kosovo)
Oranbeg Press (Boston & Brooklyn)
In Porridge Magazine’s second print issue, Zajmi* contributed a poem called “In Dreams, We Meet.”
For O Gocë’s second print issue, Zajmi* contributed a mixed media collage and opening poem.
And in an online series called etc. by Oranbeg Press, Zajmi* contributed “Nan’ Tiranë” for Fade / Fail / Flow.
* = PUBLICATION CREDIT APPEARS UNDER AN ALTERNATE NAME
1993–