Art, Social Space

Dr. Shiva Balaghi is an independent scholar and curator. Balaghi was among the first faculty to introduce the subject of Contemporary Middle Eastern Art at US universities, teaching for nearly two decades at NYU and Brown University. Her recent curatorial projects include co-curating a retrospective of Iran’s leading sculptor, Parviz Tanavoli, at Wellesley’s Davis Museum…

Bahram Beyzaie is one of Iran’s most acclaimed filmmakers, playwrights, and scholars of the history of Iranian theater, both secular and religious. He was a leader of the generation of filmmakers known as the Iranian New Wave, starting in the late 1960s, and has since directed more than a dozen prize-winning films. He has also…

Mehrdad Fakour is a lecturer and author on the subjects of culture, symbolism, art and archaeology of the ancient Near East and Early Islam. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and is a researcher in semiotics of dreams. He has received recognition and awards for teaching, playwriting, curatorship, and commercial…

Mehdi Ghadyanloo is an Iranian artist known for his utopian and philosophical paintings that interrogate universal human precepts such as fear, hope and loss. Through the portrayal of minimal heterotopic environments, surreal architectural arrangements, and the repeated use of symbolic elements such as stairs, balloons and aeroplanes, Ghadyanloo invites us to consider new realities and…

Ghalamdar (“the writer” in Farsi) is a graffiti artist (born 1994, Tehran, Iran), working since 2006. He is an active member of Calligraffiti community and called between the four most recognized Iranian street artists who are making their own mark by Art Radar Journal, and between the 12 artists crucial to the world of Iranian street art by The…

Talinn Grigor is a Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research concentrates on the cross-pollination of art and (post)colonial politics, focused on Iran and India. Her first book, Building Iran: Modernism, Architecture, and National Heritage under the Pahlavi Monarchs (Prestel, 2009) examines…

Christiane Gruber is Associate Professor of Islamic Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her primary field of research is Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images, about which she has written two books and edited a volume of articles. She…

Sohrab Kashani is an interdisciplinary artist and an independent curator based in Tehran. Sohrab is the founder and director of Sazmanab, formerly a center for contemporary art and a not for profit art space, currently an artist collective based in Tehran and on the internet. He has exhibited internationally and has held talks at Asia…

Bahman Kiarostami was born in Tehran in 1978, he started working as an assistant director in 1996. His films have focused on the political power of faith inside contemporary Iranian culture and eloquently explores the complex layers of religious significance in the Iranian controversial society. His filmography includes Monir (2014), Taxi-Tehran (2011), Javad (2011), The…

Ahoo Najafian is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies department at Stanford. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from the University of Tehran, Iran, and holds an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her work examines cultural manifestations of religion with a focus on…

Rasoul Najafian was born in 1951 in Tehran. He learned the theory and practice of music with Esmaeil Mehrtash and studied acting and directing for four years with Mostafa Oskouei. In 1974, his short film Papoli Jan won the first prize of the ABU Asian Film Festival. He has produced, directed, and acted in several…

Mohsen Namjoo is a songwriter, singer, music scholar and setar player (traditional Persian lute). Born in 1976 in Torbat-e Jam, Iran, Namjoo began his musical training at the age of twelve, and studied Persian vocal technique with many great masters. He discovered the music of rock and blues in his late teens which had a…

Nasser Rahmaninejad, a foremost celebrated Iranian artist started his theatre career in 1959 in Iran. In response to the authoritarian cultural policies and harsh censorship of the Shah’s regime, he founded his alternative, independent theatre group, Mehr, in 1966. His group, which later changed its name to Iran Theatre Association, became very influential in the…

Morshed Mostafa Sa’idi became an apprentice to a eulogist (rowze-khan) at the age of nine, with whom he travelled throughout Iran for three years. At the age of thirteen, he saw a recitation of the Shahnameh in a coffeehouse in Isfahan and was so captivated by the performance that he left his mentor and joined…

Parisa Simin-Mehr holds a BA in History and is a student of Persian Literature. She started her work in theater in 1995 and has been working on the Shahnameh and professional storytelling (naqali) since 2000 under the mentorship of Mostafa Sa’idi, one of the last remaining old-school storytellers of Iran. She has performed several stories…

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence…

Raheleh "Minoosh" Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born educator and multimedia artist who employs photography, video, installations and performance to make visible for audiences her emotional and psychological reflections as seen in her mind's eye and inspired by nature. Zomorodinia trusts and allows her creative process to reveal intuitive insights, giving form to unconscious knowledge of deeper…