The MassArt Graduate Programs and Photography department are pleased to welcome Sheida Soleimani as the final speaker of the Fall 2026 Photography Lecture Series. Please join us in the Tower Auditorium at 2:00pm on Tuesday, December 1.

Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990) is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani makes work that excavates the histories of violence linking Iran, the United States, and the Greater Middle East. In working across form and medium—especially photography, sculpture, collage, and film—she often appropriates source images from popular/digital media and resituates them within defamiliarizing tableaux. The composition depends on the question at hand. For example, how can one do justice to survivor testimony and to the survivors themselves (To Oblivion)? What are the connections between oil, corruption, and human rights abuses among OPEC nations (Medium of Exchange)? How do nations work out reparations deals that often turn the ethics of historical injustice into playing fields for their own economic interests (Reparations Packages)? How may the layering of memory and familial history both report fact, and produce a reckoning with the intimate resonances of a geopolitics of violence (Ghostwriter)? In contrast to Western news, which rarely covers these problems, Soleimani makes work that persuades spectators to address them directly and effectively.

Soleimani’s work is held in permanent collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, MIT List Visual Art Center, and Kadist Paris. Her work has been recognized internationally in both exhibitions and publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, Art in America, Interview Magazine, among many others. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is also an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator.

All Photography lectures are free and open to the public. 

Questions? Contact gradprogram@massart.edu

Image detail: Sheida Soleimani, Truce, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels