Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Video, sculpture, digital art
Website: morehshin.com
Morehshin Allahyari was born in 1985 in Tehran, Iran, and raised there during the Iran-Iraq War. She is ethnically Kurdish. At age 12 she joined a private creative writing course where she learned to tell personal narratives — a practice she continued until she was 18 and which became a launching point for her work as an artist. She moved to the United States in 2007, received an MA in digital media studies from the University of Denver in 2009, and an MFA in new media art from the University of North Texas in 2012. She is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University and lives and works in Oakland.
She is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award (2025), a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024), a United States Artists Fellowship (2021), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), and a Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019). Foreign Policy magazine named her a Leading Global Thinker of 2016. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been an artist in residence at Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk Pier 9 in San Francisco, the Vilém Flusser Residency in Berlin, Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and the Banff Centre.
Allahyari works across 3D simulation, video, sculpture, digital fabrication, experimental animation, web art, and multimodal artificial intelligence to re-figure myth, history, and cultural artifacts of the Middle East and North Africa. Her practice is grounded in two interlocking commitments: the critique of Western technological colonialism — including the concept of “Digital Colonialism” she coined in 2015 — and the feminist, queer reclamation of monstrous, othered, and suppressed figures from Islamic and pre-Islamic cultures. She works through archival practices and speculative storytelling, proposing 3D printing and digital fabrication not merely as technical tools but as philosophical and political instruments for resistance, preservation, and imagination.
Her projects frequently embed research archives inside the physical objects themselves — flash drives, memory cards — proposing a new model of documentation in which the artifact and its context are inseparable. Her approach has been described as one of “re-figuring”: taking figures and objects that have been destroyed, suppressed, or marginalized and resurrecting them in forms that expand and complicate their histories.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.