Introduction
Born and raised in Iran, Maryam Tafakory is an artist-filmmaker working with textual and filmic collage, layering poetry, speculative nonfiction, and archival fragments.
Her practice traces quiet acts of erasure upon bodies, intimacies, and histories. She looks at what is often dismissed as trivial or excessive, moving through historical gaps, unspoken rules, and concealed queer stories.
Her ongoing films and performances follow the workings of censorship, its internalisation, and the unseen architectures that hold it in place. Her research, in dialogue with post-revolution Iranian cinema and with the women involved in Iran’s clandestine leftist groups of the 1970s, continues to unfold as a constellation of interconnected works.
Selected solo screenings/exhibitions include: MoMA (New York); BOZAR (Brussels); National Gallery of Art (Washington DC); Academy Museum, (Los Angeles); Museum of the Moving Image (New York); Barbican Centre (London); e-flux (New York); Filmoteca de Catalunya (Barcelona); LUX (London); among others.
Selected group events include: Tate Modern (London); Cannes’ Directors Fortnight; New York Film Festival; Locarno Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; Villa Medici (Rome); HKW Berlin; Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York); and Anthology Film Archives (New York), among others.
Her films have received numerous awards, several Oscar-qualifying, including the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival; Best Documentary Short at the 72nd Melbourne International Film Festival; the Tiger Short Award at the 51st IFF Rotterdam, and the Cinema & Gioventù Best International Short Film award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. They have also screened at NYFF (New York), TIFF (Toronto), and BFI London Film Festival.
She was the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence, a MacDowell Fellow in 2023, and an 'Institute for Ideas and Imagination' Fellow in 2025.
pronouns [she/they/او]
photo credit: Oscar F Orengo