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Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born American artist who works in photography, video, and feature films with the stated aim of celebrating the power of women. Neshat was born in a small city outside of Tehran and attended a Catholic boarding school in Tehran before emigrating to the US in 1975, where she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in painting (1979) and an MFA (1982). Due to political revolution and instability in Iran in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Neshat found herself stranded in the United States; she was not able to return to her native country until 1990, two years after the end of the Iran-Iraq War.

Upon returning to Iran, Neshat was struck by its transformation from progressive to conservative, with policies that were especially aimed at controlling women—a stark contrast to her time in the US, where she witnessed the women’s liberation movement. She traveled back to the US and began making art that tried to reconcile the two versions of her home country. Of her work, she has stated: “The Western world sometimes views Iranian women as victims, and while they’ve been continuously oppressed by religion and difficult political situations, they’ve always fought back. They’ve always broken rules.” In many of her photographs in the 1990s, she explored veiling and concepts of violence, oppression, submission, and other symbols of Islamic culture; her art was banned in Iran in 1996 and, since that point, she has considered herself an exile.

Neshat began creating video installations in the late 1990s as well; one of her first, Turbulent (1998), explored how Iranian women, who are forbidden from singing alone in public, can challenge authority as a way of giving themselves a voice. The film was shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale, where it won a Golden Lion. In 2001, she collaborated with American composer Philip Glass on the short film Passage, and she continued making video installations in the early 2000s. In 2009, she made her feature film debut with Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan), based on the magical realist novel of the same name by Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur. It was shown at the 66th annual Venice International Film Festival, where Neshat won the Silver Lion for best director.

While working on her video and film projects, Neshat has continued to take photographs, including commissions for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York, documenting the aftermath of the Egypt uprising of 2011 (Our House Is on Fire, 2013) and for the National Portrait Gallery, London, of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai (2018). In addition to her Silver Lion and Golden Lion, she is the recipient of the Japan Art Society’s Praemium Imperiale (2017), and her work has been exhibited worldwide, including retrospectives at the Detroit Institute of Arts (2013), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2015), Washington, D.C., and the Broad Museum (2019–20), Los Angeles.