Zahra Nazari is a New York City–based painter, sculptor, and installation artist whose work fuses abstract expression with architectural form to explore identity, migration, and the evolving language of global cities. Born in Hamedan, Iran, and trained in both Iran and the United States, she transforms fragments of Persian and Western architecture into floating, deconstructed environments where past and future, memory and imagination visually collide.

Her large-scale paintings and sculptural installations draw from ancient ruins, contemporary skylines, and the psychological experience of being “uprooted,” using gestural brushwork, translucent layers, and shifting perspectives to evoke structures in motion rather than fixed monuments. Nazari’s practice is deeply informed by her own journey as an immigrant; she uses architecture as a metaphor for belonging and displacement, inviting viewers into spaces where cultural histories, personal narratives, and imagined futures fold into one another.

Nazari has exhibited widely in museums and galleries across the United States, Europe, and Asia, including the Bronx Museum, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, MANA Contemporary, and institutions in Tehran, Berlin, and Beijing. Her work has earned numerous awards and fellowships—among them programs at the Bronx Museum’s AIM, the New York Foundation for the Arts, MASS MoCA, and the Cooper Union—and is held in both private and public collections in North America and abroad.

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