“Morehshin Allahyari’s research-driven, project-based work meditates on the complex, often extractive histories of museum collecting practices, while re-interrogating the cultural legacies of the Persian Golden Age and exploring queer notions of kinship and community. Her expansive practice traverses multiple physical and digital sites, utilizing speculative storytelling and emerging technologies to retrieve and reconstruct narratives that have been historically marginalized.”
” – Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, Independent Curator and Director of Programming & Engagement, Anderson Collection

“It’s rare to find an artist this deep into a career groove who’s still curious, still willing to try new formats without sacrificing craftsmanship or incisiveness. Morehshin Allahyari reaches into the archive of Iranian culture and history with a clarion, unbashful voice, pulling out queer and miscegenated forms and refracting them through her own distinct frequency of the contemporary. I’m eager to see how the Artadia award might fuel what comes next.” – Amara Antilla, Independent Curator

As a digital media artist with a research-based practice, Moreshin Allahyari uses 3D simulation, code, film, sculpture, and storytelling as tools to re-figure history. Her work weaves together art, technology, and activism in creating complex counternarratives to technological colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). She works as an archaeologist of technologies, investigating them the same way historians examine artifacts of the past.

Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: اللهیاری مورهشین(, is a Bay Area based Iranian-Kurdish artist and an assistant professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University. She uses 3D simulation, video, code, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world, including Venice Biennale di Architettura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, MoMA, Victoria and Albert Museum, Queens Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, Taipei. She has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, and Al Jazeera, among others.