Regina Mamou completed "Mapping Collected Memory" (2009-2010) during a fifteen-month Fulbright Fellowship to Amman, Jordan. Using photography and video, Mamou explored navigational methods and memory in Amman, a city that only recently implemented street names and house numbers. Most residents still navigate the city by memory, using visual cues to reach their destinations and describing landmarks to give directions. Instead of maps with standardized addresses, which give a macrocosmic view of a city or region, Amman uses memory to navigate, giving a fragmentary and subjective view of the city and leaving ample room for narrative, imagination, interpretation, and mistakes. Mamou took informal, guided tours of Amman and used hand-drawn maps in an attempt to memorize the city’s streets and districts, all the while embracing the possibilities of getting lost. Her completed project, which includes a series of large-scale color prints, was recently added to the Midwest Photographers Project, a rotating collection of portfolios in the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

Regina Mamou was born in the Detroit metropolitan area to an American mother and Iraqi father. She completed a BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (2005), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2007). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, France; Amman, Jordan; Thessaloniki, Greece; Chicago, IL; and other cities nationally. In 2012 she curated an online exhibition by the Jordanian artist, Oraib Toukan for Women in Photography, and in 2011 she co-curated an exhibition entitled "Remember Then" at the Center for Government and International Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Currently Mamou is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Museum Education at the Art Institute of Chicago and a study leader on international travel programs for members of the museum.