Patricia Mutebi

I photograph people and the places they are in. I want to know how someone carries who they are: in the body, in what they wear, in the room they live in. The talking comes before the camera. Most of my projects start with a question I ask out loud, and the pictures come from the answer.

I am an architect, and I read a room the way I read a face. Proportion, light, what it says about the person standing in it. The room does work in the picture. It sets the mood and changes how you read the person in it.

Each project asks for something different. Some start with a conversation, and the person decides what they bring into the frame. Some start with walking, the way a street photographer works. Some are studies of light on its own. What runs through all of them is how people sit in a space.

I want to photograph people where they are, and how they move through life, without trying to change them.

Patricia Mutebi (b. Uganda) is an architect and self-taught photographer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She studied architecture in Kenya and the United States and moved to Minnesota in 2019. She photographs people and the places they are in.

Her first solo exhibition, Threads of Us: Weaving Identity and Place, opened at The Residency by Modern Day Me in Minneapolis in June 2026 and was covered by Sahan Journal and Minnesota Reformer. The series is forty-seven portraits of twenty-one Minnesotans and the homes they carry with them, each person also recorded talking about identity, heritage, and belonging.

She was selected for the 2026–2027 cohort of the Little Africa Art Residency at The African Museum, Arts & Cultural Center (AMACC), in partnership with African Economic Development Solutions. Her current projects include This Crown, an ongoing archive of Black hair and the people who care for it; The Jingle Dress: Why I Dance, a short film, still in progress, made in collaboration with Ojibwe, Dakota and Menominee dancer Valerie Leith; and Seen, an ongoing series of portraits of Minnesota mothers.