I learned various techniques and experimented with different styles. Although surreal art was far from the taste of our teachers, I made several surreal paintings, which I presented to my fellow students and my teachers.

During my study I worked parttime as a technical designer for an interior design company. I also exhibited my works in group exhibitions.

To gain more artistic freedom I moved to Amsterdam, after graduating at Al-Zahra. I enrolled in The Gerrit Rietveld Academy and I graduated in fashion design in 2006. My graduation fashion collection was called: “Childhood Memories”. It was an “Autobiographical” collection.

Nowadays, I live and work in the city of Almere, in the Netherlands. I choose to work as an visual artist. I exhibit regularly in the Netherlands as well as abroad.

Next to this I am the creator, organizer and curator of the “L’AGE D’OR” surrealistic art event. This is a repeating event, and is based on the 1930s movie “L’Âge d’or” made by Luis Buñuel en Salvador Dalí. This event is an opportunity for surrealistic artists and surreal lovers to come together and celebrate their love for the unconventional.

I was born in 1973 in Tehran, the crowded capital of Iran.
As a child, I liked to make drawings all the time. In school, while teachers where lecturing, I secretly portraited of my classmates. I made also still life and fantasy drawings, with color pencil or water color.

When I turned fifteen, my parents chose to send me to art school. I look back on this period as the most wonderful time of my life. I experienced it as being very exceptional, to meet so many inspiring people. In art school we could share ideas about art, music, fashion and even politics. We had lots of fun visiting exhibitions and bookstores. Especially the illegal, underground bookstores, were very exciting. There, we could find “banned” art books, which also showed uncovered bodies in it.

I was very interested in artists like Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud and Salvador Dali. Because art books in Iran are very expensive, I had to save money for months to buy one of these books.

“The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali absolutely moved me and triggered many emotions in me. It opened a huge world of fantasy and mysticism to me, I never experienced it before. Through this, my attention was drawn to Surrealism and Dadaism.

After finishing art school I proceeded studying art at Al-Zahra University in Tehran. Here, I followed four years of painting and drawing courses.

Photo: Collection for a project at the Gerrit Rietveld academy, Amsterdam. 2006