Shoja Azari

Shoja Azari is an Iranian born visual artist and filmmaker based in New York City. During his adolescence in Iran, Azari experimented with making short films and, in 1977, he moved to New York to study film. With the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, however, Azari returned to Iran, where he became involved with underground activities in theater, literature, and politics. Azari returned to New York in 1983, where he completed a Masters in Psychology at New York University. After a hiatus from artistic production, Azari met the visual artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat in 1997, and they began their long-standing collaboration with the two-channel video “Turbulent” (1998), in which Azari starred as well as assisted with the production. They have since collaborated on a variety of video and multimedia projects, which have garnered international critical acclaim. Since 2000, Azari has also created his own experimental short films, receiving particular notice for his series of short films, “Windows” in 2005. He has also gained a reputation as an accomplished painter, especially for the style of “video painting” he has developed that produces an illusory sense of three-dimensional movement on the canvas. Azari collaborated with three other Iranian-born artists - the visual artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat, the composer and performance artist Sussan Deyhim, and the filmmaker Ghasem Ebrahimian- on the multimedia project Logic of the Birds, which took place at The Kitchen in October 2001. For more information visit: http://www.leilahellergallery.com/artists/shoja-azari