about

Motivated by an aching for connection in a culture that’s severed from its source, my work comes into being through the process of understanding our shared and individual ontologies. I approach this on both collective and personal levels, and with a wide range of media. While studying architecture at the University of Virginia, and practicing landscape architecture afterwards, this took the form of world-building and conceptualizing new ways for people to come together in public spaces —ways that connected them to the land’s depth, nourishment, and ancestry. More recently, my process has moved inwards to investigate my own dis/connections to myself, and specifically, the yearning I feel for connection with my Iranian ancestors. While the paintings I create begin with my own ruminations on love, generational trauma, and diaspora, I open up space for the heavy conversations around healing a lineage, and what it means to approach the pain caused by another with compassion. My hope is that my work will expand to engage other perspectives and create more tangible spaces for collective recovery. My recent/continuing work channels the story-telling techniques of Persian carpets, as functional vessels that communicate the worldviews of their time. In exploring this format, I give layers to my paintings that create cosmic narratives of our time, while also learning about the language and life of my ancestors.