Maia Royez

the profile

Maia Royez is the photographer to look at if you want your Marrakech wedding to look as colourful as it actually is. The local wedding guide nicknames her the Colour Queen, lists her among the best-value photographers in the city, and describes her as perfect for zellige, bright florals, and colourful decor. That is a precise summary. Where a lot of destination photographers flatten Morocco into moody, desaturated, beige-toned frames, Royez does the opposite: she leans into the blue tilework, the pink bougainvillea, the saturated kaftans and the painted plates, and lets the place look like the riot of colour it is. If your venue is a tiled riad or a garden full of flowers, she is a genuinely strong match. Her work is documentary at heart, built around real moments rather than a long list of stiff posed groups. She shoots weddings and civil ceremonies, engagement and couple sessions, and also parties, portraits, boudoir, and family work, and her portfolio runs across France and destinations including Morocco, Italy, and Mexico, so she is comfortable with the travel-in, tight-timeline shape of a Marrakech wedding. Her site has been running under her name since 2021, and you reach her by email at contact.maiaroyez@gmail.com or through Instagram at @maia.royez, which is the fastest way to see whether her colour-forward eye is the look you actually want. On price she sits in a reasonable place. In our directory her range runs from 1,500 to 2,500, and the local guide puts a typical investment at around 20,500 dirhams, which lines up and reads as mid-market, real value for a photographer with this much personality in the images. Booking follows the usual pattern for a good photographer: her calendar fills for the popular Marrakech seasons, so a signed agreement and a deposit are what actually hold your date, and the earlier you reach out for a spring or autumn wedding the better. The 8.5 rating in our directory is well placed, a distinctive, capable photographer whose signature is clear enough that you know quickly if it fits. And that signature is exactly where the honest caveat lives, because it cuts both ways. Bold, saturated colour is a strong aesthetic choice, not a neutral default. If you love it, no one in the city does it better. If what you actually want is the soft, light, pale, film-look wedding photography that fills a lot of Pinterest boards, her work is the opposite of that, and you should not book her hoping to talk her into a style that is not hers. Look through two or three complete recent weddings, not just the highlight images, and make sure you love the way she handles a whole day, including the less flattering midday light, before you commit. Confirm the practical details too. Because she travels and works across several countries, pin down in writing whether she is available for your exact Marrakech date, and whether travel and accommodation are inside the quoted price or added on top, since that single line can move a mid-market quote noticeably. Clarify how many hours of coverage you get, whether a second shooter is included or extra, and how many edited images you receive rather than just the raw count. Ask about the delivery timeline for the full gallery, since destination photographers can carry a long edit queue in peak season. Confirm the languages she works in and that she has shot your type of venue before, a tiled riad, a palmeraie garden, a Berber-tent evening, because each lights very differently. Sort those details out, and you have a photographer who will hand you back your Marrakech wedding in full, honest colour, which is the whole reason to marry here in the first place.