Shirin Neshat Director

Biography

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker based in New York. She works and continues to experiment with photography, video, film, and opera, infusing them with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender, and the relationship between past and present, East and West, individual and collective, through the prism of her personal experience as an Iranian woman living in exile.

Shirin Neshat has had numerous solo exhibitions in international museums, including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Broad in Los Angeles, the Museo Correr in Venice, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., and the Institute of Arts and Design in New York. C. and the Institute of Arts in Detroit. She has directed three feature films: Women Without Men (2009), which won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 66th Venice Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017), and most recently, Land of Dreams, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2021).

Her first opera, Aida, will be staged at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and 2022. Shirin Neshat has been awarded the Golden Lion, the First International Prize of the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), and in 2017 the Tokyo Praemium Imperiale Prize. She is represented by the Gladstone Gallery in New York and the Goodman Gallery in London.

Debut at the Opéra National de Paris