Elisabeth Sunday (born 1958) is an African American fine art photographer known for her powerful black and white portraits of original peoples in Africa and her Mystics and Healers portraits from SoutheastAsia and Micronesia. She developed a technique called Field Mirror Photography and is the only person in the world who makes this type of imagery. She spent 26 years traveling to Africa and living with remote peoples including the Tuareg of the Sahara Desert in Mali, the Akan fishermen of Ghana, and the Koro Warriors in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia. She also lived with the Efe people of the Ituri Rain Forest and the !Kung San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, and photographed the Turkana in Kenya among many other places.
In 1999-2000, the Berkeley Art Museum organized a solo exhibition of the Mystics and Healers work: Holy People and Their Messages. In 2017, her works from the Anima and Tuareg series were exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Her work has been included in many group exhibitions, including ''Constructed Images: New Photography,'' (1989) curated by Deborah Willis for the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Her work is many museums collections, including: Berkeley Art Museum; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Le Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris; The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Oakland Museum of California; Cleveland Museum of Art; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; and the California African American Museum.
