Published on June 05, 2020

Afarin Rahmanifar

Afarin Rahmanifar is an Iranian American Artist and an Associate Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, Art & Art History Department. She specializes in painting, mixed media, installation, printmaking, animated motion picture film, and Persian miniature. Rahmanifar’s artistic vision originates from intersecting points of Eastern and Western culture, while she blends Persian queens with the Western images of Barbie dolls in renderings that look ancient and modern at the same time. She depicts the female body in relation to politics, culture, religion, and sexuality within repressed societies. Her on-going research from recent decades depicts women’s participation in art, poetry and warfare throughout history. Regardless of how far an artist is removed and apart from her homeland, politics becomes part of her artistic life.

Her most recent project “Women of Shahnameh–The Memories Between,” is a mixed media Installation that recalls Shahnameh, the Persian “Book of Kings,” an epic poem written in the tenth century by the poet Ferdowsi. This large scale installation is steeped in the stories of the women in Shahnameh and invites viewers to an alternative reading.

Rahmanifar has been a recipient of an Artist Residency Fellowship from the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts in Greece; Artist Residency Fellowship from School of Design & The Arts, Nantucket, MA; Artist Residency Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, VT. Her work has been exhibited and privately collected nationally and internationally. She has exhibited extensively across the United States, China, India, and Canada and her exhibitions were hosted by the following art institutions: Soho 20 gallery, NY; The Mattatuck Museum; Columbia University NYC; Towson University MD; La Poisson Rouge, NYC; Benton Museum, CT; Sacred Heart University, CT; Yale University, CT.