Ana Sabiá
Brasil
Biography
Ana Sabiá is a visual artist, researcher and photography professor. Her work engages with photographic research and practices developed through the body, surrealism and self-representation as critical strategies to address themes that intersect feminism, identity, poetry, literature, psychoanalysis and autobiography in contemporary photography and the creation of artist books.
She teaches courses and workshops on photography and contemporary art through online learning platforms and undergraduate and extension programmes at public universities in Brazil. From 2022 to 2024, she was a photography lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (UDESC).
She actively participates in the Brazilian and international art scenes, with exhibitions in Brazil, France, Italy, Portugal, England and Mexico. Her work is held in private and public collections, including the Museu de Arte da Bahia (MAB), the Museu de Artes Plásticas de Anápolis (MAPA), the Museu da Fotografia de Fortaleza and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).
In 2023, she received the Prêmio Mérito Cultural SC (Lei Paulo Gustavo). She is the author of academic publications on photography as well as several artist books, including the award-winning *Do porão ao sótão* (2021, Prêmio Foto em Pauta, published by Tempo d’Imagem; 2022, finalist at the IMS Photobook Festival). In 2024, she was awarded Second Place at the Prêmio Conrado Wessel de Fotografia and received the Prêmio Funarte Marc Ferrez de Fotografia.
Project
“O Sonhário Da Srª. M.N.” by Ana Sabiá is a poetic and surreal photographic series that channels the logic of dreams — where images dissolve, deform, drift and transfigure — into a layered visual narrative. The work takes its title from a “sonhário” (a dream journal), a personal space for recording and deciphering dreams as symbols and metaphors of inner existence and affect, invoking both subjective experience and cultural imagery.
At its core is the figure of Srª. M.N., imagined as the dreamer whose sonhário unfolds like an oracular journey through memory, emotion and subconscious imagery. The project interweaves references to surrealist inspiration, Fellini’s oceanic symbolism and collective dream narratives from pandemic-era archives, creating a dialogue between individual fantasy and shared psychological landscapes.
Through this conceptual framework, the series invites viewers to contemplate how dream logic, symbolic association and visual metaphor can reveal deeper layers of meaning in both personal and cultural imagination.
