Roya Nazari Najafabadi
Roya Nazari Najafabadi did not grow up in an environment that presented art as an institutional or professional path. Creativity existed instead through observation, daily life, and storytelling, rather than formal encouragement. Art entered her life as a necessity, emerging as a way to process experiences that could not be spoken openly, particularly those related to the body, gender, and social limitation.
A pivotal shift occurred when she became acutely aware of how the female body is constantly observed, regulated, and judged. That awareness reshaped art into a space for agency rather than expression alone. Making became a means of reclaiming presence in contexts where visibility is often imposed rather than chosen.
Nazari Najafabadi holds an MFA in Studio Art and is currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre. Her academic training informs a practice that moves fluidly between visual art and performance. While her MFA grounded her in visual language, material exploration, and conceptual rigor, her doctoral research expanded her engagement with embodiment, temporality, and the body as a site of knowledge and resistance. Together, these fields shape a practice that cannot be contained by a single medium.
Her work spans painting, performance, and the body, with occasional use of video and photography. Certain ideas resist remaining on canvas. Performance allows for presence, duration, and vulnerability, particularly when working with the female body as material. Recurring themes include women’s bodies, silence, stillness, Iranian women, migration, and quiet resistance. These elements are not symbolic abstractions but reflections of lived experience, where the body functions as a site of memory, control, survival, and endurance. Migration appears as both a physical condition and a psychological state of in-between.
Nazari Najafabadi’s influences come primarily from women artists and performance practitioners working with the body, especially those engaging feminist, Middle Eastern, and diasporic perspectives. These influences reinforced an approach grounded in restraint and vulnerability rather than spectacle, treating the body as a primary language.
Her creative process does not follow a fixed routine. Work often begins with observation of posture, stillness, breath, or gesture. She is attentive to spaces that regulate bodies, such as public institutions, waiting rooms, borders, and classrooms. Several projects have emerged from observing how women occupy space differently in public and private settings, particularly under conditions of surveillance or social pressure. Her daily practice involves thinking, sketching, testing ideas physically or visually, and removing rather than accumulating. Reflection holds equal weight to production.
Periods of pause are not treated as obstacles. She allows moments of low momentum to exist, understanding them as part of the work itself. One of the most challenging and formative experiences in her practice involved using her own body as material. That process was both difficult and transformative, revealing how vulnerability can function as strength. This exploration included creating a face-sculpture mask and incorporating it into body-based performance.
Her work does not aim to deliver explicit messages. Instead, it invites attention and pause, asking viewers to become aware of how bodies, particularly women’s bodies, are shaped by power, culture, and movement across borders. Fulfillment comes from producing work that feels honest, even when unresolved or uncomfortable. Success is measured through integrity and depth rather than visibility.
Looking forward, Nazari Najafabadi plans to continue working between painting and performance, developing research-based projects and expanding her international exhibition practice. Being a woman, Iranian, and a migrant remains inseparable from her work. Balance, for her, is understood as fluid rather than fixed, sustained through silence, walking, and deliberate distance from constant production.
