Artist and Photographer
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. She works and continues to experiment with the mediums of photography, video, film and opera, which she imbues with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender and the relationship between the past and present, East and West, the individual and the collective, through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.
She has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, the Broad museum in Los Angeles, the Museo Correr in Venice, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Ms. Neshat has directed three feature-length films: “Women Without Men” (2009), for which she received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival; “Looking for Oum Kulthum” (2017); and, most recently, “Land of Dreams” (2021), which premiered at the 78th Venice Film Festival. She directed her first opera, Verdi’s “Aida,” at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and 2022, which will be restaged at the Paris Opera House in 2025.
She is the recipient of myriad accolades and honors, including the Golden Lion Award, also known as the First International Prize, at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. She also won the 6th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2005 and the 2006 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. In 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, a lifetime achievement award presented by the Japan Art Association.
Photo credit: Lyle Ashton Harris - Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan/Naples
