Andamion Murataj

From neighborhood photographer to international, award-winning filmmaker, Murataj made his big-picture dreams come true. 

From the time he was 12 years old, when Andamion Murataj, an Albanian native, snapped his first pictures of local people and their surroundings in grim realistic light that few had seen at the time, capturing authentic life has been the trademark of his visual work. “With an old camera, I took my first pictures of people in my neighborhood in the outskirts of Tirana, bizarrely named “Kombinati Stalin,” says the Albania native. From that point forward, it was all art, all the time. Besides photography, Andamion intensively explored painting, sculpture, design, theater, and video. Andamion earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Teaching from The University of