BIO
Anna Mistal is a creative producer and photography curator based between New York, Paris, and Zurich. For over twenty years she has been a fashion stylist for both editorial and advertising, and for more than five years she has produced and curated alternative art projects and exhibitions in non traditional spaces, such as hotels and urban sites.
Mistal moved to New York in the late 1990s and started her fashion career on the sets of Richard Avedon, Arthur Elgort and Mark Seliger as a freelance editorial stylist with Condé Nast. In the process she developed a passion for photography. While working as a stylist she went to Parsons School of Design and earned an MFA in Interior Design in 2006. As an interior designer Mistal gained insight into, and experience with, the fine arts by commissioning and buying artworks for her interior design projects and clients.
In 2016, Mistal decided to collaborate with different artists and photographers, giving them the opportunity to produce new series of work through the exhibitions she curated with them, and by selling their work through exclusive contracts.
Mistal’s first project was the 2016 exhibition Material Turn in Brooklyn, New York, which was a collaboration with photographer Paul Jung and German fashion designer Melitta Baumeister. The following year she worked with photographer Ellinor Stigle and Australian knitwear designer Katherine Mavridis to produce 28” 2” 3, a site-specific video installation and performance in Soho, New York inspired by the late renowned British architect, artist and designer Zaha Hadid.
Her most significant recent projects have been with the Beijing based artist Lin Zhipeng aka 223.
223@Grand Amour was a natural extension of their ongoing dialogue as friends and collaborators. For this project Mistal’s concept was for 223 to create a photographic narrative inside her favorite Paris boutique hotel, Hotel Grand Amour. 223 photographed nudes and still lifes in the famed hotel, drawing on the striking decor of the hotel’s interior as a backdrop for his photographs.
Vogue Paris declared that 223@Grand Amour was one of the most important exhibitions during Paris Photo 2018. The first-edition of the monograph documenting the project, a copy of which is in the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, sold out within a month, and has been subsequently reprinted.
In September 2023, Mistal and 223 returned to Paris for Amour Défendu (Forbidden Love). Described by acclaimed art critic Jerry Saltz as “amazingly epic,” and a display of “radical vulnerability,” this time Mistal’s vision was to see the well-known cityscape through the lens of 223. The result was an alternative photographic narrative of the familiar trope of Paris as “the city of love.” Nudes, including LGBTQ+ bodies, were captured in ecstatic expressions of freedom in lesser-known parts of Paris, as well as in cultural institutions, such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP).
She is currently working on a short documentary film.