Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian‑American photographer, visual artist, filmmaker and performance creator whose work bridges the cultural divide between the Islamic world and the West. Born on March 26, 1957 in Qazvin, Iran, she grew up in a wealthy, religious family and attended a Catholic boarding school in Tehran before moving to the United States to study art at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned BA, MA and MFA degrees. After graduating in 1983 she lived in New York City, married Kyong Park and spent a decade working at the avant‑garde Storefront for Art and Architecture, a period she later described as a time when she made “practically no art”. In 1993 she returned to creating seriously, launching the seminal Women of Allah photographic series that juxtaposed the female form with Persian calligraphy to interrogate gender, faith and identity. Over the next two decades she expanded into video installations such as Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999), earning the International Award at the 1999 Venice Biennale and cementing her reputation as a master of dual‑screen, light‑and‑dark contrast. Her feature‑film debut Women Without Men won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice Film Festival in 2009, demonstrating her ability to translate visual motifs into narrative cinema. Neshat’s practice is distinguished by its poetic use of music, poetry and calligraphy, collaborations with artists like Sussan Deyhim, and a persistent focus on the lived experience of Muslim women under oppression. She has been honored with the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), the Praemium Imperiale (2017), and numerous retrospective exhibitions, including a major show at The Broad in Los Angeles (2019). Beyond the gallery, she engages in activism, participating in hunger strikes at the UN and supporting the Mahsa Amini protests, underscoring her belief that art is a “cry for humanity”.