Born in 1980 in Mali, Fatoumata Diabaté started out at the Promo-Femmes Audiovisual Training Center in Bamako.
In 2002, she was one of the first women to join the Center de Promotion pour la Formation en Photographie de Bamako (CFP), which aims to professionalize Malian photographers. She stayed there for two years and became a technical assistant in the film photography laboratory until 2009.
She has been invited to numerous festivals around the world and has won several awards, including the Africa Creation Prize from the Association Française d’Action Artistique (AFAA). She takes part in the Bamako Photography Biennial (2005, 2009, 2011, 2019), the La Gacilly photo festival (2017) as well as the Voies off festival of the Rencontres d’Arles (2018) and the Dakar Biennale ( 2018).
In 2013, Fatoumata Diabaté designed the “Street photo studio”, a traveling photo studio that is invited by numerous cultural spaces and festivals, the Cartier Foundation in 2018 and the Rencontres de la photo d’Arles in 2019 in particular.
Since December 2017, she has been president of the Association of Women Photographers of Mali. She was an exhibition curator at the last Rencontres de la biennale photographique de Bamako.
Her work has been the subject of several groups and individual exhibitions in Mali, France and internationally. She is represented by various galleries, most recently the 31Project gallery in Cape Town, South Africa (2020).
She has just been selected for the next UNESCO digital campaign among the 10 women creators of West Africa, and was the 2020 laureate of the Photographic residences of Quai Branly.
Fatoumata Diabaté divides her time between Montpellier and Bamako.