Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, and educator. She was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. Her modeled, 3D-printed sculptural reconstructions of ancient artifacts destroyed by ISIS, titled Material Speculation: ISIS, have received widespread curatorial and press attention and have been exhibited worldwide. She is the recipient of the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine, and her work has been shown at the Queens Museum, the Tate Modern, Venice Biennale di Archittectura, and Centre Pompidou, among many others.
Allahyari is currently developing a new body of work on Digital Colonialism and ‘re-Figuring’ as a Feminism and de-colonialism practice, using 3D scanners and 3D printers as her tools of investigation. Researching dark goddesses, monstrous, and djinn female figures of Middle-Eastern origin, Allahyari devises a narrative through practices of magic and poetic-speculative storytelling, re-appropriation of traditional mythologies, collaging, meshing, scanning, and archiving. She was recently awarded two major commissions by Rhizome as well as the Whitney museum of Art, Liverpool Biennale, and FACT to work on developing archival and web-based aspects of this project.