Morehshin Allahyari

Biography

Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian-Kurdish artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a professor at Stanford University, whose interdisciplinary practice works at the intersection of video, sculpture, digital fabrication, and artificial intelligence. Her work approaches emerging technology from a position that sets her apart within the broader field of AI and digital art, using early AI models and 3D simulation to explore questions of identity, mythology, and cultural memory rather than treating the generative image as spectacle. She is best known for Material Speculation: ISIS (2015-2016), a series of 3D-printed reconstructions of artifacts destroyed by ISIS in the Middle East, which used digital fabrication as an act of cultural preservation and resistance, embedding USB drives containing research data inside the printed objects themselves. Her Moon Faced series (2021), released through Feral File, extended this politically engaged approach into the language of AI-generated imagery, treating the generative image as a site of meaning rather than novelty. Allahyari's broader practice includes writing, organizing, curation, and teaching, reflecting a commitment to building community and critical discourse around technology's relationship to cultural heritage, particularly for diasporic and Middle Eastern communities. Her work has been exhibited internationally and held in major institutional collections, and she continues to develop new bodies of work, including recent pieces that transform painting into immersive three-dimensional forms inspired by Persian miniatures and architecture.