Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. Neshat works across photography, video, film and opera, creating highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives. Through the perspective of her experience as an Iranian woman living in exile, she examines questions of power, religion, race and gender, as well as the relationships between past and present, East and West, and the individual and the collective. Neshat has presented numerous solo exhibitions at international museums, including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Broad in Los Angeles; the Museo Correr in Venice; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has directed three feature films: Women Without Men (2009), for which she received the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival; Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017); and Land of Dreams (2021), which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. Neshat made her operatic directorial debut with Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg Festival in 2017. A revised version of the production was presented there in 2022 and subsequently staged at the Opéra national de Paris in 2025. Her major distinctions include the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the Hiroshima Art Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival (2009) and the Praemium Imperiale for Painting (2017). In 2024, she also received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement.