Azita Moradkhani

Azita Moradkhani's work in drawing and sculpture focuses on the female body as a complex locus of pleasure and pain, venerated yet vulnerable. A symbol subjected to societal norms, scrutiny, and violence in public and private, the body is a subversive form in Moradkhani’s layered compositions; the sensuality of the drawings seduce the viewer’s gaze, only to confront them with embodied images of political uprisings, historical and current events, and human exploitation. This disruptive iconography challenges the fraying constructs of nationhood and belief inherited by the artist, unraveling across her new body of work.

Two worlds – birthplace and adopted home – live alongside one another in Moradkhani’s work. Both realms join intimately on the picture plane, whether in 2-D on paper, or on 3-D casts of her own body. In her sculptural work, through the collaborative process of casting her body, and in her printed textile work, she emphasizes the marks of history and memory on the body and its coverings.

Azita Moradkhani(b. 1985, Iran) was born in Tehran where she was exposed to Persian art and culture, as well as Iranian politics, and that double exposure increased her sensitivity to the dynamics of vulnerability and violence that she now explores in her art-making. She received her BFA from Tehran University of Art (2009), and both her MA in Art Education (2013) and her MFA in drawing, painting and sculpture (2015) from Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. Currently, she teaches at Parsons School of Design and Rhode Island School of Design.

She was a recipient of both the Young Masters Art Prize and the Young Masters Emerging Woman Art Prize in London in 2017. She received the Saint Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artists Grant that same year as well as the NYFA City Artist Corps Grants in 2021. The Financial Times (London) reviewed her series of drawings “Victorious Secrets” and the Boston Globe (MA) published reviews of her collaborative performance piece “Irezumi,” and her curated exhibition “Echo” over the past few years.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, CHN. She has also been a visiting artist/lecturer at universities such as Davidson College, Davidson, NC; Lesley University, Cambridge, MA; and Parsons School of Design, New York, NY. Moradkhani served as a panelist at Harvard University, Southern New Hampshire University, and MIT. She has been granted numerous residencies, including Yaddo, Virginia Center For the Creative Arts (VCCA), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), Silver Art Projects, Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA), and LMCC.