Born in Addis Ababa in 1974, Aïda graduated with a degree from the Communication Department with a major in Film from Howard University in Washington D.C. Her photography can be found in several publications as well as the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, the Hood Museum, the The RISD Museum of Art and the Museum of Biblical Art in the United States. She is the 2007 recipient of the European Union Prize in the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, in Bamako, Mali, the 2010 winner of the CRAF International Award of Photography in Spilimbergo, Italy, and a 2018 CatchLight Fellow in San Francisco, USA. In 2019, she also became the first black woman to co-curate the Nobel Peace Prize exhibition. The following year she returned as a commissioned artist for the prize.
She has been a jury member on several photography competitions, most notably the Sony World Photography Awards 2017 and the World Press Photo Contest 2017. She has also been on various photography panel discussions, such as the African Union cultural summit, Art Basel, and Tedx/Johannesburg. In 2019, she also gave the renowned Sem Presser Lecture at the World Press Photo Festival in Amsterdam. A Canon Ambassador, Aida is the founder of the Addis Foto Fest (AFF), the first international photography festival in East Africa held since 2010. As an educator and cultural entrepreneur, she continues to develop projects with local and international institutions in Ethiopia and Côte d’Ivoire.