Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat was born on March 26, 1957, in Qazvin, Iran, and has lived and worked in New York for much of her adult life. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a BFA, MA, and MFA, and her practice has since expanded across photography, video installation, and film to become one of the most internationally recognized bodies of work addressing gender, political power, religious authority, and cultural identity.

Neshat's early photographic series Women of Allah (1993–1997) established the visual language that would define her international reception: black-and-white images of the female body, the veil, and firearms overlaid with handwritten Persian calligraphy, placing questions of martyrdom, violence, and political identity at the center of her work. This foundation gave way to a major cycle of two-channel video installations. Turbulent (1998) contrasts a male singer performing before an all-male audience with a woman singing alone to an empty auditorium, turning gendered access to public voice into a spatial and sonic confrontation — a work that earned Neshat the International Award at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. Rapture (1999) extended this inquiry through parallel screens and opposing groups to examine gender segregation, ritual, and the unequal organization of public and private space, while Fervor (2000) continued the cycle with a cinematic examination of desire, religious morality, and surveillance. In 2009, Neshat received the Grand Prix at the Gwangju Biennale and the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival for Women Without Men, a feature film adapting Shahrnush Parsipur's novel that interweaves the lives of four women against the backdrop of Iran's 1953 coup. Subsequent projects broadened her geographic and thematic scope: The Book of Kings (2012) brought calligraphic portraiture to bear on the upheavals of the Arab Spring, drawing on Persian literary and political history; The Home of My Eyes (2015) examined cultural identity and memory through portraits of people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in Azerbaijan; and Land of Dreams (2019) turned her lens toward the United States, exploring American identity and cultural difference through large-scale portraiture and moving image.

Neshat's exhibition history spans institutions across multiple continents, including solo presentations at the Tate Gallery in London (1998), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2006), the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha (2014), and, most recently, The Fury at Gladstone Gallery New York and Goodman Gallery London (both 2023), The Fury at Dirimart Istanbul (2024), and Do U Dare! at Lia Rumma Gallery Milan (2025). Her work is held in the Pinault Collection and the IAC / Frac Rhône-Alpes, among other institutions. Among her many distinctions, she has received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), the Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum at Davos (2014), the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2017), the Le Vie dell'Immagine Award from the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice (2023), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2024). She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Brussels, Goodman Gallery in London, Lia Rumma Gallery in Milan, and Dirimart in Istanbul.