Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Her photographs and video installations are highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives which question issues of power, religion, race, gender, and relationships between past and present, occident and orient, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian living in exile.

Shirin Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–97), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favour of more poetic imagery and complex human narratives. Shirin Neshat continues to explore and experiment with the mediums of photography, video and film. Her most recent bodies of work include the photographic series Land of Dreams (2019), The Home of My Eyes (2015) and the trilogy Dreamers comprised of three video installations: Illusions and Mirrors (2013), Roja and Sarah (2016). 

She has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which 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 International Film Festival. 

Shirin Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2021); The Broad, Los Angeles (2020); Museo Correr, Venice (2017); Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2015); Detroit Institute of Arts (2013); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2006); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2005); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2000); and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2001). 

She was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005) and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006). In 2017 she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo. 

Shirin Neshat directed her first opera, Verdi’s Aida, at the Salzburg Festival in 2017. 

She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York and Goodman Gallery in London.