About the Speakers

Yasi Alipour is an Iranian artist/writer based in Brooklyn. Her tactile works on paper uses folding to explore mathematics as a language, with all the historical, social, political, and embodied ramifications any language holds. In her writing, research, and pedagogical approach, Alipour focuses on intergenerational conversations that happen through and within histories of erasure. Alipour currently lives in Brooklyn and wonders about paper, counting, and silence.

She is a recipient of the Dartmouth Artist-in-Residence (2024), Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant (2022), Sharpe Walentas Studio Program Award (2019/2021), Rema Hort Foundation Emerging Artist Nominee (2018/2019), and the Triple Canopy Publication Intensive (2018). Her work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, spaces including solo exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery (2024, NY), Schlomer Haus (2023/SF), Bavan Gallery (2022, Iran), Transmitter (2022, NY), 12 Gates Gallery (2022, PHL), the Geary Contemporary (2021), Venice Biennale (2019, IT), Museum of Contemporary Art Vijdovina (2018, SR), and PPOW (2017, NY).

Her writing has appeared at the Brooklyn Rail, Spot Magazine, Asia Contemporary Art Week, Photograph Magazine, Volume One/Triple Canopy, and Dear Dave. She has been the recipient of MHZ Foundation’s Critics of Color (Curationist) and awarded the Guest Editor of the Brooklyn Rail’s Critic’s Page (November 2021). Her recent featured interviews include Julie Mehretu, Dorothea Rockburne, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Okwui Okpokwasili, Sanford Biggers, Yto Barrada, Hans Haacke, Mark Dion, Aliza Nisenbaum, Jane Benson, and Kevin Beasley. Alipour holds an MFA from Columbia University and has been a Faculty at RISD, Parsons, New School, and SVA.

yasamanalipour.com

Sareh Z Afshar is a writer, translator, scholar, and storyteller. Their research and teaching interests reside at the intersection of performance and politics, with an emphasis on critical cultural theory, materiality of visuality, aesthetics of everyday life, minoritarian memory and trauma studies, collective movements and new/digital media ecologies, and transnational queer feminist praxis. Having received her PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, she’s now an Associate Research Scholar at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iranian & Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University, where she’s writing her first monograph, “Authority & Ambiguity: Performances of Death and Power in Postrevolutionary Iran.” Co-editor of the multilingual, multimedia platform, Feminist Futures, their writing has appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, e-misférica, TPQ: Text & Performance Quarterly, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Khayyam, Ravagh, and edited book volumes. Having lost more than two cities—lovely ones, Montréal, Tehran, New York—she spends her time in New England contemplating the balance between being too foreign for home and too foreign for here.

sarehzafshar.com

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