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Francis Dzikowski has been the photographer for the Theban Mapping Project since March of 1995. He is responsible for all of the photography for the ongoing excavation of KV 5, which includes documenting the interior of the tomb as well as the artifacts. He has photographed extensively in Luxor, concentrating on the decorated tombs in the Valley of the Kings for recent projects including images for the new website.
Born in Syracuse, New York, and raised in Manassas, Virginia, Francis studied architecture at Virginia Polytechnic Institute before going on to receive a B.F.A. in Photography at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During the summer of 1993, he was the site photographer at the excavation of the Temple of Pan at Banias, in the Golan Heights. In the fall of 1993 he moved to Istanbul, Turkey and began working on a personal project documenting Seljuq architecture in Central Anatolia while at the same time producing a series of silk screen prints for Turkish photographer, Gültekin Cizgen.
Francis arrived in Cairo during the fall of 1994. "I came to Cairo searching for work and knocked on Dr. Weeks' door. His photographer had recently left and there was work that needed to be photographed on his desk. So he hired me part time. Four months later, he made the big breakthrough into corridor 7 in KV 5, exposing forty-eight new chambers. I have been working full time for the Theban Mapping Project ever since." His work for the Theban Mapping Project has been published in numerous magazines including, Time, GEO, KMT and Minerva.
In addition to his work with the Theban Mapping Project, Francis documented the restoration of an eighteenth century Ottoman structure, the Sabil-Kuttab Nafisa al Bayda, a three-year project completed in 1997. He is currently working one weekend a month photographing the pharaonic and Islamic collections of the Gayer Anderson Museum, a seventeenth century Cairo house preserved along with its contents in its original state. Francis is also teaching photography courses in the Journalism and Mass Communications Department at the American University in Cairo.
2001 was a significant year for Francis, when he took on several new and exciting personal responsibilities in addition to his professional ones: He married Claudia Haj Ali early in the year in Faaborg, Denmark, and then witnessed the birth of their son, Luca, in Cairo later that year.
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